Translations of Poems by Shez
Translation and Commentary by Elliott batTzedek
Shez’s Rikud Ham’shuga’at / Dance of the Lunatic was published in Israel in 1999. It was the first openly, unapologetically lesbian poetry collection published in Israel (and in modern Hebrew). This was Shez’s first book, and is still in print. She’s since published three other books, including fiction and memoir, and has written plays and short stories and had work published in Israeli Jewish women’s erotica anthologies. A resident of Tel Aviv, she was named an “Honored Cultural Figure” of the Gay/Lesbian community in 2004. Shez has two blog sites: http://www.harzaya.com/index1.html and http://www.blogs.bananot.co.il/showPost.php?blogID=153.
Shez’s name is an acronym for shem zaman, which means “temporary name.” It is the name she took after leaving her father’s house, which had for her been the site of years of physical and sexual abuse. Her family name was Yerushalmi, which you’ll find in a reference to her father in the poem “Exodus from Auschwitz.” Throughout the book, she builds a complex set of images that both describe the abuse and give it a powerful and astonishing location within her culture; in many of the poems she identifies her father as Hitler in a deep way that contains the story of Hitler’s terror without diminishing it. This is no easy equating of “European Jewry” with “helpless children” but the voice of a powerful, mature poet exploring what it means to live under a violent power you cannot escape, one that violates every human boundary.
Shez’s father’s name was Abraham, and so she’s also built a series of tellings, twistings, and reinventions of the God/Abraham/sacrifice of Isaac story. God in her book is sometimes male and sometimes female, sometimes an ally of her father and sometimes a lesbian or compassionate woman. Fragmented images of the sexual violence she experienced as a child inform every part of this book, as does her resistance and resilience, from the opening poem about a tree struggling with the memory of having been broken, hammered into, and urinated on by dogs, but still knowing that its head is in the heavens and that its leaves are caressed by God’s breath, to the closing poem in which Shez envisions a day of redemption in which fathers who rape are finally silenced so terrorized girls can be heard.
Shez’s Rikud Ham’shuga’at / Dance of the Lunatic was published in Israel in 1999. It was the first openly, unapologetically lesbian poetry collection published in Israel (and in modern Hebrew). This was Shez’s first book, and is still in print. She’s since published three other books, including fiction and memoir, and has written plays and short stories and had work published in Israeli Jewish women’s erotica anthologies. A resident of Tel Aviv, she was named an “Honored Cultural Figure” of the Gay/Lesbian community in 2004. Shez has two blog sites: http://www.harzaya.com/index1.html and http://www.blogs.bananot.co.il/showPost.php?blogID=153.
Shez’s name is an acronym for shem zaman, which means “temporary name.” It is the name she took after leaving her father’s house, which had for her been the site of years of physical and sexual abuse. Her family name was Yerushalmi, which you’ll find in a reference to her father in the poem “Exodus from Auschwitz.” Throughout the book, she builds a complex set of images that both describe the abuse and give it a powerful and astonishing location within her culture; in many of the poems she identifies her father as Hitler in a deep way that contains the story of Hitler’s terror without diminishing it. This is no easy equating of “European Jewry” with “helpless children” but the voice of a powerful, mature poet exploring what it means to live under a violent power you cannot escape, one that violates every human boundary.
Shez’s father’s name was Abraham, and so she’s also built a series of tellings, twistings, and reinventions of the God/Abraham/sacrifice of Isaac story. God in her book is sometimes male and sometimes female, sometimes an ally of her father and sometimes a lesbian or compassionate woman. Fragmented images of the sexual violence she experienced as a child inform every part of this book, as does her resistance and resilience, from the opening poem about a tree struggling with the memory of having been broken, hammered into, and urinated on by dogs, but still knowing that its head is in the heavens and that its leaves are caressed by God’s breath, to the closing poem in which Shez envisions a day of redemption in which fathers who rape are finally silenced so terrorized girls can be heard.
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About the author

I recently finished an MFA in poetry from Drew University where I studied with Alicia Ostriker, Joan Larkin, Ross Gay, and Anne Marie Macari. I’ve returned to Drew for the program in poetry in translation, where I am working closely with my mentor Ellen Doré Watson to translate Dance of the Lunatic. I work as a consultant, adjunct graduate school faculty, co-leader of Fringes, a poetry-based, feminist havurah in Philadelphia, and general gadfly in the face of the powerful. My own work shares many of Shez’s themes and appears or is forthcoming in Two Lines Translation Anthology, Armchair/Shotgun, Adanna Literary Journal, Naugatuck River Review, Poetica, Poemeleon, Lamba Literary Online, Sinister Wisdom, and as a Split This Rock poem of the week. My poem/memoir about surviving incest, “Wanting a Gun”, appeared in Trivia Issue 6, 2007. For more information, visit my blog at http://thisfrenzy.wordpress.com/.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.