Jerusalem as Longing: A Conversation with Rachel Tzvia Back

For poet and translator Rachel Tzvia Back, Jerusalem has never been merely a city. "Jerusalem is an idea," Back says. "It's a vision we're aspiring towards. It's a very real city, a very tortured city, a very conflicted city - and also a vision, an idea, and I think it always was. From the first time it was mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, it was a desire."

That conviction is at the heart of her new anthology, This Longing City, a collection of Hebrew poems about Jerusalem translated into English, spanning nearly a century of verse from the 1930s to the present day.

Back came to this project from a place of deep personal connection. Her father's family were Jerusalemites going back several generations, having moved to the Old City in the early 1840s, and she grew up with an intense attachment to the city. When she began researching poetry anthologies in English devoted to the Hebrew poems of Jerusalem, she was startled to find that none existed. "How is it possible that there is no such anthology in English?" she recalls thinking. Once she understood the gap, the project felt inevitable.

This Longing City is the first in a new series called InVerse published by Hebrew Union College Press, started to promote Jewish poetry. This is the fourth publication from Back, including two collections of Tuvia Ruebner's poetry and the last poems of Lea Goldberg, to come from the Press.

"This Longing City fills a gap that has existed in English-language literature for far too long. Rachel Tzvia Back brings both a poet's ear and a deep personal connection to Jerusalem to this translation, and the result is a collection that will introduce Hebrew poetry centered around Jerusalem to readers who have never encountered it before. We're proud to have this book as part of the HUC Press catalog," said Jason Kalman, Ph.D., Co-Director of the Hebrew Union College Press.

Working from two canonical Hebrew-language anthologies - one from 1983, one from the early 2000s - Back built her own collection outward, extending it into the 2020s and bringing conscious intention to its curation. She set herself two goals beyond the poems themselves: greater representation of women, particularly difficult in the earlier decades when fewer women were being published, and more meaningful inclusion of Mizrahi and Sephardic voices. The anthology ultimately features 41 poets. Back is satisfied with the balance she achieved.

One of the central threads running through the collection is the gendering of Jerusalem as female - a choice Back made almost instinctively, carrying over the Hebrew grammatical convention that assigns the city a female identity. When a colleague challenged her on this, noting that English doesn't naturally gender cities, Back was struck by how little she had considered the alternative. "It never crossed my mind not to gender Jerusalem," she says. "The very first poetry I read in my childhood was biblical poetry. Jerusalem is always gendered female - she's often sitting in sackcloth, she's all alone, she's a tragic figure from the get-go, even as she is beautiful and enticing."

The title itself emerged from a poem by Tuvia Ruebner, which Back describes as one of poems in the book that is most important to her. In it, Jerusalem is bound on her boulders - not Isaac awaiting sacrifice, but the city herself - and the poem pulses with longing in every direction. "When I first read Ruebner's poem, years ago, I was blown away by it," Back says. "From that moment, I could never get past the longing that reverberates from poems of Jerusalem."

On the question of translation, Back is candid and exacting. She resists the word "faithful" as a standard, preferring to think of her work as "translocating" - moving a poem from one linguistic world into another that shares no kinship with it. Hebrew and English are not neighboring traditions; one is Semitic, the other Indo-European. "I'm going to say something radical," she says. "The translation is a new poem." Even so, she holds herself to rigorous formal standards: preserving stanza breaks, line counts, and, where the original uses end rhyme, working to find an English equivalent rather than abandoning the form. Free verse, dominant in Hebrew poetry from the 1960s onward, is easier to carry across; earlier, more structured poems demand more creative problem-solving.

The anthology has not been without controversy. A piece published in the Akron Jewish News - picked up by the Jewish News Syndicate - accused Back of letting her left-leaning politics shape her exclusions, pointing specifically to the absence of the poet Uri Zvi Greenberg and the lyricist Naomi Shemer. Back is direct about both omissions. Greenberg's estate has a longstanding policy of not permitting his work to be anthologized - a decision she finds counterproductive and frustrating, but one entirely outside her control. Shemer, she explains, is a lyricist, not a poet, and belongs to a different genre altogether. She adds, "in an anthology of lyrics and songs on Jerusalem, she would be prominent."

For the uninitiated reader picking up This Longing City for the first time, Back is clear about what she hopes they'll find. She is not offering a history of Hebrew poetry - that, she says, is a different book by different scholars. What she is offering is something more immediate: a portrait of a place that has driven people to obsession, to beauty, and to grief across generations. The literary scholar Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi's phrase, she says, captures it best - Jerusalem is both "toxic and intoxicating." And the poets offer something politicians do not.

"What the poets offer is a humanity that the politicians never offer," Back says. "You can go days and weeks and months without feeling the humanity of this place, and of the love for this place. This collection is a celebration of the city. It's an extended love song."

In an ideal world, she adds, the anthology would have a companion volume of Arabic poems on Jerusalem. She doesn't read Arabic, and her instincts as a translator are too particular to collaborate on something she couldn't read in the original - so that book remains unmade. But the one she has made is, she says, is also a book for her parents, both passionate Jerusalemites. This book is a love letter to a city that has never stopped asking to be loved.