Hebrew on a Desert Island: The Case of Annabelle Farmelant

The poetic output of the American-born poet and playwright Annabelle “Chana” Farmelant consists entirely of two books of Hebrew poetry, Iyyim bodedim (Desert Islands) and Pirchei zehut (Flowers of Identity), published in Israel in the early 1960s. In this article, I offer an overview of Farmelant’s oeuvre through my own English translations of her poems and in the context of American Hebrew literary history and scholarship, which has long neglected women writers. Farmelant’s short career as a poet notwithstanding, her work engaged directly—and thereby offers crucial attestation of—the gender politics and U.S.-Israel literary relations that contributed to the decline of American Hebrew literature in the mid-twentieth century and to Farmelant’s early departure from the field of modern Hebrew poetry.