Flowers of Perhaps: Selected Poems of Ra'hel

by Rachel Bluwstein, Robert Friend (Translator)

Ra’hel (Bluwstein) (1890-1931) published all her poetry under her first name only. She arrived in Palestine in 1909, and lived near the Sea of Galilee in Kibbutz Degania. Unable to work with children because of tuberculosis, she left the kibbutz and settled in Tel Aviv, where she lived out the final years of her life. Ra’hel's life has taken on mythic proportions for Israel’s reading; her collected verse remains one of the country’s greatest bestsellers.

Genres: Poetry

59 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Rachel (Bluwstein) (1890 - 1931, b. Vyatka, Russia) published all her poetry under her first name only. She arrived in Eretz Israel in 1909, and lived in an agricultural school for girls on the shores of the Sea of Galilee until 1913. She then went to France to study agronomy and drawing, and with the outbreak of World War I returned to Russia, where she worked in educational institutions for refugee children. During this period she contracted tuberculosis. In 1919, she returned to live on Kibbutz Degania. Unable to work with children because of her illness, she left the kibbutz until she finally settled in a lonely one-room apartment in Tel Aviv, where she lived the final five years of her life. She died at the age of forty, and was buried near the Sea of Galilee. She published most of her poetry during her last six years. Rachel`s life has taken on mythic proportions for Israel`s reading public and a volume of her collected verse remains one of the country`s greatest bestsellers.

Rachel`s poetry is lyrical, excelling in its musical tone, simple language and depth of feeling. Her love poems stress a feeling of loneliness, distance, and longing for the beloved. Other poems deal with human fate, with the poet`s relation to her own difficult life, and death. Some of her best-known verse expresses love for Eretz Israel and a nostalgia for the Sea of Galilee.

—ithl.org.il

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A true classic of Hebrew poetry. The sorrow and sadness found in this work is profound, relatable, yet nevertheless a testament to Rachel's time and place growing up in pre-state Israel. So glad to have read this.

Stylistically, her poems are modernist. This mean that her poems can be challenging and require some knowledge of context and some critical thinking to fully grasp.