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According to Anne Lerner, the poet Esther Raab presented herself to her first readers in 1922 with the lines:

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I am under the thornbush

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Nimble, menacing,

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Laughing [at] its thorns

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To greet you I straightened up.

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At a time when Hebrew poetry by women was just beginning to be published, these lines introduced many of the themes and poetic devices that\\xa0came to characterize Raab\\u2019s poetry and the way it was read: A stark landscape, an unconventional female central character, a hint of a biblical inter-text, bold color, a linkage between eroticism and nature, and sparse, idiosyncratic punctuation.

Host Marcela Sulak reads Raab\'s poems\\xa0"Holy Grandmothers in Jerusalem" and "Night" (translated by Shirley Kaufman), and "She-fox" (translated by Kinereth Gensler), which ends with these lines:

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A hungry she-fox lifts her head to the Pleiades,

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a cold star mirrored in her eye

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could be a tear in her pupil.

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The cub will suckle at life\\u2019s sad marrow\\u2014

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the howl of foxes splits the night.

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Text:

The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present. Ed. Shirley Kaufman, Galit Hasan-Rokem and Tamar S. Hess. New York: The Feminist Press, 1999.

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Music:

Chava Alberstein - "The Birds Don\\u2019t Know"

Limor Oved\\xa0- "A Woman\'s Song." Melody by\\xa0Ahuva Ozeri, arranged and produced by\\xa0Gadi Sari, words by Esther Raab.

Ayelet Rose Gottlieb - "A Woman\\u2019s Song." Words by Esther Raab.

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