As a dream: it’s all – different, different
To a nameless shore we take flight
You and I all alone upon the Kinneret
in a boat with sails glowing white.

From the rays of the moon we have weaved us a chain
binding one to another since yore.
Still our dream have not failed – we remain, we remain
in its golden road walking once more.

Recollections past flowing like water from fountain
cold and quenching on days hot and dry.
But one night and its moon – with its light to brighten
all the days that have since gone by. ^[1]

כַּחֲלוֹם: הַכֹּל – אַחֶרֶת, אַחֶרֶת
וְאֶל חוֹף לֹא-נוֹדָע טָסִים
אָנֹכִי וְאַתָּה עַל פְּנֵי הַכִּנֶּרֶת
בְּסִירָה לִבְנַת מִפְרָשִׂים.

מִקַּרְנֵי הַיָּרֵחַ שָׁזַרְנוּ שְׁנֵינוּ
אֶת הַפְּתִיל הַקּוֹשְׁרֵנוּ מֵאָז.
לֹא כִּזֵּב הַחֲלוֹם – הֵן עוֹדֵנוּ, עוֹדֵנוּ
מְהַלְּכִים בִּשְׁבִילוֹ הַמּוּפָז.

הֵן זִכְרוֹ הָרָחוֹק כְּמֵימֵי הַמַּבּוּעַ
הַמַּרְוִים-צוֹנְנִים בַּשָּׁרָב.
לֵיל יָרֵח אֶחָד – וְאוֹרוֹ זָרוּעַ
עַל יָמִים רַבִּים אַחֲרָיו.

Legecy

To hold the legacy of a person in your hands is a strange feeling. This legacy is what I’m really reviewing here: a collection of the three published poetry books of Rachel Bluwstein ^[2], better known in Israel as Rachel the poet.

Her influence on Israeli poetry is as succinct as it is deep. This little anthology, 125 pages long and about 10 on 15 centimeters in size, is the bulk of her work. Her first two books, ‘Aftergrowth’ and ‘Across From’, were probably edited by her and published in 1927 and 1930, respectively. The third one, ‘Nevo’ was edited and published posthumously by her friends in 1932.

Rachel is considered one of the greatest poets of Israel ^[3]. Her sad face graces the current twenty Shekel bill, part of the current set that is dedicated to poets. Her poems are studied as part of the matriculation examination in Israel, and a huge portion of them have been composed and are considered classics. Her tragic fate and the beauty of her poetry are an encapsulation of a specific Israeli ethos. Her reward for becoming a symbol is remembrance, a second life.

This review is an act of love. Love to Rachel and her poems, love to the work of translation, love to the Hebrew language and its history, which in turn shaped Israel itself.

It is not for me to tell you what is worth loving, what is worth knowing. It is not for me to tell you what is the consequence of love, whether loving one person or one group of people negates the love you have for another. I’m going to stick to Rachel’s work, but I can’t explain her work without explaining how she and those she considered her people thought.

I hope I’m able to convey her work’s beauty across time and language and distance.

One hell of a family, one hell of a journey

Rachel's father, Isser-Leib Bluwstein, was kidnapped into the Russian army when he was 8 years old. He was educated in a cantonist school, in which conversion to Christianity was heavily encouraged. Still, he refused to relinquish his Jewish customs. After 25 years of service he was a free man, and could travel and settle anywhere he wanted in Russia. He took great advantage of that freedom, and made a fortune in trading furs. He married and had four children with his first wife, who died young.

Rachel was born in 1890, a scant few years after the pogroms in Russia, which was one of the main factors that led to the first wave of jewish immigration to Israel. She was one of eight children borne by Isser’s second wife, Sophia.

Rachel’s mother was an incredibly intelligent woman, part of the well-to-do and educated Jewry. She herself exchanged letters with Leo Tolstoy, her brother was the head of the fifth Zionist Congress, her sister was a Russian revolutionary who participated in a plot to assassinate the Russian Tzar. Sophia died when Rachel was 16.

After Sophia’s death Isser was determined to marry again. He published an advertisement in a newspaper that he is looking for a new wife, someone to take care of the children and run the household. A woman named Masha accepted the call and travelled to meet Isser. According to Rachel, when her father met Masha he told her that she doesn’t seem all that much to him, but since she came all this way…

In 1909, when Rachel was 19, she and two of her sisters, Shoshana and Bat Sheva, traveled to Israel. It’s not clear if Israel was the intended destination or merely a stop, and on whose behest the trip was made. Perhaps Rachel intended to go to Italy to study drawing, the main interest of her youth. Perhaps it was Shoshana’s idea, who was involved in the Zionist movement back home.

Whoever idea it was, the three sisters came to Israel. As the ship was nearing shore, Rachel had a nearly transcendent experience. She was overtaken by the sight, and began to sing the Tikvah, the song that would one day be Israel’s national anthem.

In Israel, Rachel began to learn Hebrew in ernest, during a time where Hebrew was just waking from a millennia of slumber. She and her sister made a pact to only speak Hebrew among themselves, save for half an hour a day. Rachel read the Bible, listened to children speaking Hebrew in the kindergarten, and was tutored by one of the first native Hebrew speakers of Rehovot. That man was named Nakdimon Altschuler, and he was Rachel’s first love. He would also be one of the last people to see her alive.

Soon enough Rachel came into contact with the pioneers of Israel. Those were people that believed that the salvation of the Jewish people was not just about coming to Israel, but about working the soil, living a productive and physical life, unlike the bankers and merchants of exile. Rachel was enchanted by this ethos, the same way she was enchanted by the Hebrew language. In 1911 Rachel moved to the ‘Maiden farm’, a training farm for women near lake Kinneret, what is known in English as Sea of Galilee.

And Perhaps…

And perhaps it all never occurred,
Perhaps
I have never drawn bread from the field
by the sweat of my brow?

Have I never, on harvesting days
hot and long,
high atop a cart heavy with wheat
raised my voice in a song?

I was never cleansed in the pure blue
of the stream
of my Kinneret… my Kinneret,
were you but a dream?

ואולי לא היו הדברים…

וְאוּלַי לֹא הָיוּ הַדְּבָרִים מֵעוֹלָם,
אוּלַי
מֵעוֹלָם לֹא הִשְׁכַּמְתִּי עִם שַׁחַר לַגָּן,
לְעָבְדוֹ בְּזֵעַת-אַפָּי?

מֵעוֹלָם, בְּיָמִים אֲרֻכִּים וְיוֹקְדִים
שֶׁל קָצִיר,
בִּמְרוֹמֵי עֲגָלָה עֲמוּסַת אֲלֻמּוֹת
לֹא נָתַתִּי קוֹלִי בְּשִׁיר?

מֵעוֹלָם לֹא טָהַרְתִּי בִּתְכֵלֶת שׁוֹקְטָה
וּבְתֹם
שֶׁל כִּנֶּרֶת שֶׁלִּי… הוֹי, כִּנֶּרֶת שֶׁלִּי,
הֶהָיִית, אוֹ חָלַמְתִּי חֲלוֹם?

Half a meeting

The name of this anthology is taken from one of Rachel’s own poems. It is not one of her most famous, no doubt it was chosen for how it relates to Rachel's time as a poet herself. She wrote and published most of her poetry during the last six years of her life, from her mid thirties until her death at forty years old. Looking nearly a century past, rifling through the detritus of her life in an attempt to understand her, that name feels apt. This was but half a meeting, nothing close to satisfactory, yet it ignited so much.

Let’s read it:

To meet, to meet in part, a glance returning swift,
dull fragments of a talk — that’s all…
Again it’s all aflood, again it’s all adrift
the pain and beauty of your thrall

A lone forgetting dam — that I had built as shield —
has quickly fallen to decay.
And with the raging water all around I kneeled
at last to drink my thirst away!

פְּגִישָׁה, חֲצִי פְּגִישָׁה, מַבָּט אֶחָד מָהִיר,
קִטְעֵי נִיבִים סְתוּמִים – זֶה דַי...
וְשׁוּב הֵצִיף הַכֹּל, וְשׁוּב הַכֹּל הִסְעִיר
מִשְׁבַּר הָאשֶׁר וְהַדְוָי

אַף סֶכֶר שִׁכְחָה – בָּנִיתִי לִי מָגֵן –
הִנֵה הָיָה כְּלֹא הָיָה.
וְעַל בִּרְכַּי אֶכְרַע עַל שְׂפַת אֲגַם סוֹאֵן
לִשְׁתּוֹת מִמֶנוּ לִרְוָיָה!

This poem is a good representation of her sensibilities as a poet: The straightforward language for her time, the succinctness of the poem, her attention to the natural world as expressed by the water metaphor, the lost love.

Rachel’s poetry has two throughlines: an appreciation of beauty, and the tragic ending of things. An end can be death, it can be lost love, lost friends, a lost home. The specific nature of the thing doesn’t matter, what matters is that it came to an end. And those two tendencies, something is beautiful, something is lost, wind the tension that propels her poetry forwards. The tragedy of loss can only be felt if the thing lost was worthwhile to begin with.

To translate is to lose something - it is a product of love that is doomed to be frustrated. You love the original poem, the original language, or why else would you try to translate it? You also love the target language, or why else would you try to translate the original poem into it?

But your efforts are bound to fail, you can never get all the meaning, all the sounds, all the context across the different languages.

I, too, have failed. My greatest departure from the poem is in the fourth line: “the pain and beauty of your thrall”. The original meaning is “the breaking wave ^[4] of happiness and pain”. Though it is widely accepted in Israel that this poem is about lost romantic love, the poem itself is more ambiguous: what is the exact ‘wave’? The fact that she just met that person? The return of her love, and with it her pain? Is it romantic love, or a love of camaraderie?

I impose a single meaning on that line: the fact that she is in ‘his thrall’ (i.e. in love with him) brings both pain and beauty to her. Why do this? Why take a complex and vague sentiment and reduce it to one definite meaning?

To maintain the rhyming scheme and meter she has chosen in the original poem.

For the uninitiated, a meter is the specific pattern of stressed and unstressed words in a poem. Let’s take Shakespear’s most famous line as an example:

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”

That is an iambic meter, meaning an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. Broken down, with the stressed syllables bolded, it looks like this:

“Shall I com|pare thee to a sum|mer’s day?”

Rachel uses a loose iambic meter as well, in this poem.

The changes I impose on the poem stems from my view of what a translator should do, and how I write my own original poetry. In my opinion, a translator should strive to make the same choices the original poet would have made if she was writing in the target language. And since words do not rhyme themselves, and a meter isn’t sustained out of thin air, I have chosen to preserve her original choices, much more concrete than her possible intended meaning in one line. Some of Rachel poems lack a strict meter, and in them I give the literal meaning precedence. Otherwise, if I depart from her original choices it's because of my own failures as a translator. And even in such situations I try to preserve the original feel as much as I can.

In a happy twist of faith, both Hebrew, English, and Russian (which was Rachel’s native tongue) poetry are syllabo-tonic, meaning that both the number of syllables, and which syllable is stressed, give the poem its structure. Without that stroke of luck, I doubt I could have translated any of her poems at all.

A golden day

The time that Rachel spent near the Kinneret was probably the happiest of her life. She was completely dedicated to her new life as a worker. She was described as charismatic, intelligent, and sharp. A new kind of woman, a new kind of Jew, a new kind of person. One that doesn’t shrug away from any aspect of life: not from the physical, the spiritual, or the intellectual.

There were a few different farms and settlements around the Kinneret beside the Maiden Farm. The people who worked there, the people who became Rachel’s friends, would go on to be the leaders and thinkers of Israel.

One anecdote describes Rachel as sweeping after her two separate farms in a dance of Rondeau, another has her escorting a boat in the Kinneret, waving and jumping on the shore. This is how Zalman Shazar, the third president of Israel ^[5] and perhaps Rachel’s lover, described their first meeting:

“The first thing I heard was: a wonderful choir of songbirds conducted afar by a great, charming, clear and commending Hebrew language - I stood still. And here the gate opened and from the yard exhausted a flock of geese, pouring with an uproar into the hill, and behind the flock - a tall shepherdess, blue eyed and white dressed, light as a doe and beautiful as the Kinneret. In her hand a branch of dates, and with this specter and with a warm and young voice, with her flexible and soaring back she controls the noise, with softness and might, and at dawn. With flowing Hebrew, she takes the flock of geese from the yard of the farm of the Kinneret to the pasture.

I hid with bated breath behind a fence, until the pureness left.
That shepherdess was the poet Rachel.”

For a time it was so beautiful and so alive. And though Rachel didn’t know it then, it would be lost.

A distant sound

In 1913, Rachel went to France to study agronomy. There, she met Michael Bernstein and fell in love. Their relationship eventually came to an end, though we don’t know all the details. Letters that he sent her indicate that he had done something to hurt her, perhaps through his indecisiveness. We don’t have her answer, what she wrote to him. Perhaps those letters are somewhere, in some attic in Russia or France, waiting for the winds of history to blow them into our path.

This poem, composed into one of Israel’s most well known love songs, is widely believed to be about Bernstein. I emphatically recommend you listen to it, in all its haunting and strangely upbeat glory. You can listen to it here: החלונות הגבוהים - זמר נוגה (התשמע קולי)^[6].

A Tender Song

Will you hear my voice, my own distant one,
Will you hear my voice, at what land you are –
Voice a-singing strong, voice a-crying wan,
And a blessing sent from a time afar?

In a world immense full of countless trails,
They might meet an hour, then forever cross.
One may seek and tread, yet his power fails,
One can never find the thing that was lost.

My last day is perhaps nearly about,
Soon the day of parting will rise above,
I will wait for you till my life go out,
Like Rachel awaits her beloved.

זֶמֶר נוּגֶה

הֲתִשְׁמַע קוֹלִי, רְחוֹקִי שֶׁלִּי,
הֲתִשְׁמַע קוֹלִי, בַּאֲשֶׁר הִנְּךָ –
קוֹל קוֹרֵא בְּעֹז, קוֹל בּוֹכֶה בִּדְמִי
וּמֵעַל לַזְּמַן מְצַוֶּה בְּרָכָה?

תֵּבֵל זוֹ רַבָּה וּדְרָכִים בָּה רַב,
נִפְגָּשׁוֹת לְדַק, נִפְרָדוֹת לָעַד.
מְבַקֵּשׁ אָדָם, אַךְ כּוֹשְׁלוֹת רַגְלָיו,
לֹא יוּכַל לִמְצֹא אֶת אֲשֶׁר אָבַד.

אַחֲרוֹן יָמַי כְּבָר קָרוֹב אוּלַי,
כְּבָר קָרוֹב הַיּוֹם שֶׁל דִּמְעוֹת פְּרֵדָה,
אֲחַכֶּה לְךָ עַד יִכְבּוּ חַיַּי,
כְּחַכּוֹת רָחֵל לְדוֹדָהּ.

What do we lose when we travel from Hebrew to English?

First of all, an entire world of substance that cannot be properly translated. In her first draft, Rachel ended the poem with “as Solveig awaits her beloved”. Solveig was the love of Peer Gynt, the hero of the play with the same name. She waited for Peer to return, while he was traveling the world. Solveig was also Bernstein’s pet name for Rachel. At the advice of her niece, she changed it to the biblical character of Rachel, who had to wait fourteen years until she could marry her beloved Jacob.

How can we be sure that Rachel the poet has the biblical story in mind? By the specific Hebrew word she uses for ‘beloved’. That word is דודה - doda - which in modern Hebrew means ‘her uncle’. But in biblical Hebrew, its meaning was one of romantic love. Every Hebrew reader, even now but especially a hundred years in the past, would have thought about the Bible as she read that line, about Song of Songs, chapter six:

I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine, who grazes among the roses.
אֲנִ֤י לְדוֹדִי֙ וְדוֹדִ֣י לִ֔י הָֽרוֹעֶ֖ה בַּשּֽׁוֹשַׁנִּֽים:
Ani ledodi vedodi lee haroea bashoshanim.

In Hebrew the mythology of the past is so near, you can almost touch it.

The second thing we lose in translation is the original meter. Rachel’s original meter is an anapaest followed by an iamb, meaning two unstressed syllables, a stressed one, and then unstressed and stressed again. That meter is established in the very first words of the poem - “will you hear my voice?” - which is both the most literal meaning of the original Hebrew sentence, and also matches the number of original syllables.

In a Hebrew transcription, with stressed syllables bolded, it reads like this:

Ha|tish|ma ko|lee

Two words, the first three syllables long and the second two. There is no doubt about the meter, there is only one correct way to pronounce it. But “will you hear my voice” is a looser creature: Most readers would probably read the words “hear” and “voice” as stressed, because they are the most important words in that sentence. What stops them from stressing the word “will”? Absolutely nothing. The best I could do was to not outright contradict the original meter.

The problem, the thing that makes the art of translating poetry both riveting and frustrating, is that English and Hebrew have inherently different characters. Hebrew is more dense and compact, a tightly wound coil waiting to spring. Take the sentence “I love you” as an example: In Hebrew, both the word ‘love’ and ‘you’ have different forms for male, female, male plural and female plural. Three measly words, and you already know so much more than you would in English. And if you really want to go far, you can condense the sentence “I loved her” into a single word - אהבתיה - A|ha|vti|ya.

Hebrew’s nature is expressed in a myriad of ways: one syllable words are less common, verbs carry more information about the relevant party, conjunctives tend to exist not as separate words, but as letters to be added. For example, you can add the letter Yud - י - to the end of a word to denote possession, or the letter Hey - ה - to turn a phrase into a question.

Rachel does both, turning:
האם תשמע את הקול שלי?
Haeem tishma et hakol sheli?

To:
התשמע קולי?
Hatishma kolee?

Both phrases mean “will you hear my voice?” but the second one is both more condensed and more lyrical.

It’s no coincidence that what takes English five words to describe Hebrew can do in two, and then add some extra information just for kicks: we can tell Rachel is writing about a male from the way the verb is conjugated.

This denseness is carried over to the way verbs are structured. There are only four tenses in Hebrew: past, present, future and command. Each verb is constructed around semitic roots: a group of letters, usually three, which are poured into specific patterns. There are seven main verb patterns (binyanim, meaning buildings), each one of them associated with a different meaning, and another form that doesn’t have an official status of a ‘building’, but functions as one for our current purpose. Each building has a different way of conjugation depending on the relevant party (single and plural, male and female, tense).

Let's take the root כ.ת.ב - c.t.v as an example ^[7]. It’s a root that has to do with writing, and as a noun those three letters mean just that.

All the verbs presented here will be in the male singular past form, for simplicity sake.

Binyan form	Conjugated verb	Example
Pa’al - פעל	Catav - כתב	Wrote – Moshe wrote a letter
Nif’aal - נפעל	Nichtav - נכתב	Was written – a letter was written
Pi’el - פיעל	Citev - כיתב	Cc – Moshe cc’ed him to the email
Puˈal - פועל	Cutav - כותב	Was cc’ed – Moshe was cc’ed to the email
Hif’il - הפעיל	Hichtiv - הכתיב	Dictate – Moshe dictated a letter
Huf’al - הופעל	Huctav - הוכתב	Was dictated – a letter was dictated
Shif’el - שיפעל(not an official building)	Schich’tev - שיכתב	Rewrote – Moshe rewrote the letter
Shuf’al - שופעל(passive form of the fake building)	Shuchtav - שוכתב	Was rewritten – the letter was rewritten
Hit’pa’el - התפעל	Hitcatev - התכתב	Correspond – Moshe corresponded with the doctor.

There are also many, many nouns that are derived from the same root: writer, writing, journalist, hand-writing, magazine, address, letter, writing desk, dictation, correspondence, caption, subtitles, spelling, and Ketubah, a Jewish marriage contract.

All those different yet related meanings, based on three measly letters.

This is Hebrew: an expertly and tightly crafted lace, an ever changing pattern governed by the same rules. This helps ground readers if they meet an unfamiliar word, which is especially relevant for contemporary readers reading Rachel. She was writing in the 1920’s, a time of transformative change in the Hebrew language. She wasn’t a native speaker, none of the founding members of the Hebrew literary movement were.

Hebrew is still changing, revising itself into something leaner. Certain sounds are extinct, like the guttural Ein (ע), which is pronounced as an A sound. The letter Hey (ה) is also on its way out, and it too is often pronounced like an A. Certain conjugations of a verb are no longer in use, like the future plural female form. The Academy of the Hebrew Language is still putting out lists of new words every year. While a big portion of them are animal breed names and the like, some of them are words that simply didn’t have a specific Hebrew equivalent, like the word consensus ^[8]. And this is after a century of Hebrew as a living language! During Rachel’s time the change must have been faster and more pronounced.

The effect for a current reader is something familiar and strange at the same time. You see a word which you have never read or heard spoken in your entire life, yet still you can understand its general meaning, both by context and the familiar root. It is an enchanting sort of feeling, one that cannot be reproduced in English.

This is the dance of the Hebrew language. Not the grand Jeté of English, so light on its feet it might float away. Hebrew is staying put, doing a complicated Irish jig, if you will. Such a strange, stumbling language. They raised you from the grave and taught you how to dance. The amazing thing, it worked!

How beautiful you are. How bound I am to lose you, in this place.

The falcon cannot hear the falconer

While Rachel was studying in France, World War I came. Her father, who emigrated to Israel one year after her in 1910, could no longer send her money. Israel was under Ottoman rule at the time, an enemy of France and Russia. With no money to sustain herself, Rachel said goodbye to France and to Bernstein. The two never met again.

Rachel first went to her brother in Italy. But as time and war went on he was less able to help her, or perhaps she felt like a burden. She then went to Russia, and began to wander from one relative to another. But Russia was drowned in chaos and Rachel had to fend for herself. She began teaching until she could find a way back to Israel.

After years, salvation! The British, now in control of Israel, opened its gates, at least partly. Rachel began lecturing about Israel and the Kinneret in an attempt to fund her journey home. From synagogue to synagogue, from town town she went. Eventually, Rachel made her way back in 1919 aboard the Ruslan, the ship that heralded the third wave of immigration to Israel.

Nevo

Only my story I know how to tell.
Small is my world like the world of an ant,
like her I carry a burden immense
resting on shoulders too meager and scant.

So have my way – as her way to the tree top –
treacherous way of toil long braced,
was by a giant’s hand, wicked and mirthful,
was by a mocking hand laid to waste.

All of my efforts wept for and broken
Fear of a giant’s hand had filled my nights.
Why have you called me, you shores of mystique?
Why have you failed me, faraway lights?
רַק עַל עַצְמִי לְסַפֵּר יָדַעְתִּי.
צַר עוֹלָמִי כְּעוֹלַם נְמָלָה,
גַּם מַשָּׂאִי עָמַסְתִּי כָּמוֹהָ
רַב וְכָבֵד מִכְּתֵפִי הַדַּלָּה.

גַּם אֶת דַּרְכִּי – כְּדַרְכָּהּ אֶל צַמֶּרֶת –
דֶּרֶך מַכְאוֹב וְדֶרֶךְ עָמָל,
יַד עֲנָקִים זְדוֹנָה וּבוֹטַחַת,
יַד מִתְבַּדַּחַת שָׂמָה לְאַל.

כָּל אָרְחוֹתַי הִלִּיז וְהִדְמִיע
פַּחַד טָמִיר מִיַּד עֲנָקִים.
לָמָּה קְרָאתֶם לִי, חוֹפֵי הַפֶּלֶא?
לָמָּה כְּזַבְתֶּם, אוֹרוֹת רְחוֹקִים?

The above poem opens Rachel’s last book, Nevo, the one published after her death. According to the bible, Navo was the mountain on which Moses stood and saw the promised land, the same land he could not enter. Rachel used Nevo as a metaphor for disappointment that is bound to happen in one of her poems, ‘From Across’.

This poem too was composed, and can and should be listened to here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDYx0IBxfUg&list=PLECy7q4d8wkErxSVGpzKdo1vH5eITLTc_&index=3

Fate is seldom kind, least of all to poets. Rachel was back in Israel, back in the Kinneret, this time settling in a kibbutz called Degania. But nothing was the same. During her time in Russia, Rachel contracted tuberculosis. She had hoped that Israel’s sun and air would cure her. It was not so.

Weak from her illness, she was unable to work physically as she did in the past. Her very presence was dangerous to those around her. Still, she clung to her old life as much as she could. Rachel had a special connection to the children of Degania: In her diary she described a conversation with Moshe Dayan, who would become Israel’s minister of security during the six days war. As a five year old he asked her about God, and then ran away when he heard there was news from the stables. His mother was described as gripping a column in despair when she saw how close he and Rachel were, afraid that he would fall sick.

Soon Rachel was turned away from Defania with these words: “You are sick and we are healthy. And so you must leave.”

Left she did. She spent the next few years wandering between different flats and sanatoriums. She taught Hebrew, translated and wrote original poems for the newspaper ‘Davar’. Her father passed away in 1924, left an apartment to each one of his five sons, and one to his third wife. He donated money to various causes in Israel, such as building a synagogue and an orphanage. In his will he left five monthly Pounds to his unmarried daughters, including Rachel.

The Israeli consensus is that Rachel’s father has effectively disinherited his daughters, and that the monthly allowance he left them was insufficient, that Rachel has spent her last years in poverty. But when I tried to find out just how much five Pounds were worth during that time, every source I could find points to it being a sufficient sum for a single person to live on. The inflation and currency calculator I found translated 5 Pounds back then into a sum very close to the median income in today’s Israel. A book about Israeli agriculture from 1925 mentions 3 pounds as a reasonable price for a Dunam of good land (somewhere between 900 to a 1,000 square meters), and a Dunam of land with dates, grapes or olives costing something like 15 pounds. Google’s AI search names it as the monthly salary of a skilled worker. Besides, how could Rachel stay in sanitariums if she was poor? Did the members of Degania pay for it, or were they charity institutes, working for free? Rachel, who wrote so much in her poetry about her disappointment from her friends and lovers, never wrote anything about abandonment by a parent?

Something doesn’t add up, and I can’t make it. The past is a foreign land, even when it is physically so very near. The exact conditions of Rachel's last years are not clear to me. What is clear is how she felt:

Abandoned.

Betrayed.

Alone.

The dead still speak

Those last few years of Rachel, so miserable and devoid of hope, were also her most creatively productive. Every single poem I showed you here was written during that time.

Rachel spent her final months in a sanatorium. A day before her death she asked to see her old love and friend, the man who taught her Hebrew, Nakdimon Altschuler. Her last spoken words were a greeting to him.

Nakdimon, now a grown man with a family, began crying as he saw her. He said this about their meeting:

“I saw before me a husk of a person, all bones, and only her sad eyes expressed anything and proved that before me is a living human being.”

On 16.4.1931 she passed away in a hospital. She was buried in the Kinneret cemetery, as was her request.

A hand written page, containing the following poem, was found on the dresser in her room the day of her death. This is the poem that ended ‘Nevo’, as well.

My Dead
"The dead alone will not die"
Y.S.K

Just they are left to me, ones who will not fade
Only they alone can flee death’s sharpest blade.

Along the twisting path, at the end of day
silently surround me, walk me on my way.

A bond everlasting, loyal souls entwine
only what I have lost, is forever mine.
מֵתַי
“רק המתים לא ימותו”
י.ש.ק.

הֵם בִּלְבַד נוֹתְרוּ לִי, רַק בָּהֶם בִּלְבַד
לֹא יִנְעַץ הַמָּוֶת סַכִּינוֹ הַחַד.

בְּמִפְנֵה הַדֶּרֶךְ, בַּעֲרֹב הַיּוֹם
יַקִּיפוּנִי חֶרֶשׁ, יְלַוּוּנִי דֹם.

בְּרִית אֱמֶת הִיא לָנוּ, קֶשֶׁר לֹא נִפְרָד
רַק אֲשֶׁר אָבַד לִי – קִנְיָנִי לָעַד.