We have been a trans­la­tion team for the last dozen years, bring­ing works of Hebrew to Eng­lish-read­ing audi­ences. We’ve trans­lat­ed and pub­lished sto­ries by Nobel Prize win­ner Shmuel Yosef Agnon and by one of the founders of mod­ern Yid­dish and Hebrew lit­er­a­ture, Mendele the Book Sell­er (S. Y. Abramovitch). After work­ing to illu­mi­nate clas­sic pieces by these Jew­ish male authors, we sought out a female writer to bring into our cur­rent moment. We found a fas­ci­nat­ing fig­ure in Eli­she­va Bukhovsky, a woman who immi­grat­ed with her fam­i­ly to the Yishuv from Rus­sia and pub­lished in the 1920’s under her Hebrew first name. Eli­she­va was the first female to write a nov­el in mod­ern Hebrew​.In her poet­ry we found a musi­cal, flu­id, mod­ern Hebrew gov­erned by the Sephar­di pro­nun­ci­a­tion. In her sto­ries, we found her grap­pling with mul­ti-cul­tur­al­ism dur­ing a time we may not asso­ciate with this topic.

Eli­she­va was a Jew by choice. Though she nev­er actu­al­ly con­vert­ed in a reli­gious cer­e­mo­ny, she con­sid­ered her­self one of the new Hebrews, and a mem­ber of the Jew­ish peo­ple; she mar­ried a Jew­ish man, wrote pri­mar­i­ly in Hebrew, and even made Aliyah to Pales­tine in 1925 as a young adult with her hus­band and child.

Her poems and short sto­ries bring a for­mer outsider’s fresh­ness and enthu­si­asm to many Jew­ish images and events. Pine trees in Russ­ian became can­de­labras in the Holy Land, crys­talline stars twin­kle like can­dles send­ing out a Sab­bath kiss, a medieval knight guards the gates of Jerusalem.

Eli­she­va was an out­sider through­out her life. In Rus­sia she was raised in an Eng­lish-speak­ing, Protes­tant fam­i­ly. In Pales­tine, she was accept­ed by the lit­er­ary com­mu­ni­ty yet viewed by many as oth­er. Most of her lit­er­ary out­put was in mod­ern Hebrew, the pri­ma­ry lan­guage of a select few at the time, and in Elisheva’s case her fourth lan­guage. In the lit­er­ary world, she was an out­lier as a woman in a large­ly male cohort. 

In all these ways, Elisheva’s point of view was that of some­one who always felt and saw her­self on the mar­gin, so we have enti­tled our book Eli­she­va: Woman on the Mar­gin.

This out­sider per­spec­tive is not lim­it­ed to lit­er­ary sym­bols. In her short sto­ries Eli­she­va exam­ines the rela­tion­ships between Jews and non-Jews from mul­ti­ple angles. One sto­ry tells of a non-Jew­ish woman in love with a Jew­ish man; anoth­er of a non-Jew­ish man in love with a Jew­ish woman; anoth­er describes a Jew­ish woman’s rela­tion­ship to her non-Jew­ish col­leagues, as well as her close friend­ship with a non-Jew­ish woman. The nov­el, Byways, which we have excerpt­ed in this work and pared down into a com­pelling novel­la, tells of the attrac­tion of a Jew­ish writer and a non-Jew­ish poet­ess for one anoth­er — an attrac­tion that nei­ther one feels free to act upon.

Final­ly, Eli­she­va uses her insight as a woman to con­vey expe­ri­ences not typ­i­cal­ly being told by her male lit­er­ary coun­ter­parts, such as descrip­tions of gowns, and what they rep­re­sent for the wear­er, snip­pets of women’s gos­sip, and an explo­ration of the inner lives of women trapped in their often-dif­fi­cult circumstances.

In her hey­day, Eli­she­va was called by con­tem­po­rary crit­ics a Ruth from the Vol­ga. Nine­ty years after she was last trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish, she is now ready to be met again by the Jew­ish peo­ple who once claimed her. We invite you to engage in your own voy­age to dis­cov­er a too-long for­got­ten mod­ern Hebrew innovator.