Paris or Jerusalem? The multilingualism of Esther Raab

With the 1930 publication of her first book Kimshonim (Thistles), Esther Raab entered the Modern Hebrew literary canon as the first native poet of the Yishuv. Raab's native status not only obscured her heterogeneous linguistic and cultural background but also attenuated her affiliation with the Yishuv's immigrant literary culture and her involvement in Modern Hebrew's emerging modernism. Through a close reading of select prose texts and poems, I trace Raab's shifting and ambivalent relation to her multilingual beginnings, her native writer status, and the "diasporic burdens" of the Yishuv's immigrant writers. I show that Raab's experiences in Cairo and Paris, which preceded the publication of Kimsbonim, not only allowed her to problematize her native status, but also, ultimately, enabled her to claim her own diasporic ties and assume a literary identity that was both native and immigrant.