Dichter
Esther Ettinger
Esther Ettinger
(Mandatory Palestine, 1941)
© Iris Nesher
Biografie
Esther Ettinger’s work, an editor has remarked, “is infused with her own religious sensibility, drawing on associations from the world of Bible, Midrash, traditional liturgy and Talmud”. As may be seen here in the article ‘A Great Woman’, Admiel Kosman’s analysis of Ettinger’s poem ‘Elisha’, she is able to tell an “utterly new story” about the relations between women and men by drawing on a cryptic episode about the prophet in the second book of Kings.
In Dreaming the Actual, an anthology of Israeli women’s writing, Miriyam Glazer quotes Ettinger as saying “Most of my childhood and youth was spent in the shadow of war.”
Ettinger’s Polish parents, Glazer notes, immigrated to Mandatory Palestine before the Second World War. But the rest of their families stayed in Poland. “When I was born in Jerusalem,” Ettinger told her, “my parents named me ‘Esther’ after my father’s late grandmother, not knowing whether anyone else in the family was alive or dead”. Stories about her family’s experiences in the Holocaust “found their way”, Glazer says, into Ettinger’s first book of poems (Possible Green), which was awarded the Neuman Prize by the Jerusalem Writers House.
According to critic Rochelle Furstenberg, Ettinger’s novel Night Wonder also contains many autobiographical elements: “Ettinger’s parents . . . were part of the Yiddish-speaking business community in Tel Aviv in the 1950s. The line between Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox was not clearly drawn at that time, and she was sent to a Bais Yakov school [which now serves only the ultra-Orthodox population]. In her novel, Ettinger juxtaposes the Bais Yakov education of the protagonist Atara Henig with the girl’s attraction to the music, movies and fashion of Tel Aviv. Her teacher, Raizl, is a very pious survivor of Bergen-Belsen who espouses the teachings of the [real-life] founder of Bais Yakov, Sara Schneirer, in an attempt to cleanse the young women of what she terms ‘foreign influences.’”
Ettinger's history, fascinating as it is, is not her only subject. Her work looks at our lives from a lively, contemporary point of view enriched by her knowledge of Jewish sources.
© Lisa Katz
BIBLIOGRAPHYPOETRY
In Hebrew
Possible Green, Tel Aviv, Neuman/Tcherikover, 1981
Before the Music, Tel Aviv, Hakibbutz Hamuechad, 1986
Lent by the Artist, Jerusalem, Keter, 1991
A Perfectly Bourgeois Life, Tel Aviv, Am Oved, 1998
Night and Day, Tel Aviv, Hakibbutz Hamuechad, 2011
In English
One poem in The Defiant Muse, NYC, Feminist Press, 1999
Five poems in Dreaming the Actual, Albany, NY, SUNY Press, 2000
NOVELS
In Hebrew
A Perfect Lover (with Ruth Almog), Jerusalem, Keter, 1995 (in German translation: Munich, Goldmann, 1999)
Estelina My Love (with Ruth Almog), Jerusalem, Keter, 2002
Night Wonder, Tel Aviv, Am Oved, 2005
NON-FICTION
In Hebrew
Zelda: Black Rose, Tel Aviv, Mapa, 2007
LINK
Complete bibliography in Hebrew, including links to reviews of Ettinger’s books
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Gedichten
Gedichten van Esther Ettinger
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