Neḥamah Pukhachewsky

Born Neḥamah Feinstein in Brest in the Russian Empire (today Brisk, Belarus), Neḥamah Pukhachewsky (Nehama Puḥachevski) was brought up in a Hasidic family. She studied for several years in a gymnasium, though her parents removed her at age thirteen and completed her primary education at home with private tutors. Precocious in her command of Hebrew, Pukhachewsky corresponded at length with the eminent Hebrew poet Judah Leib Gordon as a teenager and began contributing articles to the Hebrew press under the pen name Nefesh (Heb. “Soul”) around the same time. Pukhachewsky married Michael Pukhachewsky, a member of the Zionist Ḥibat Tsiyon movement; in 1889, she immigrated to Palestine with her husband, who had been selected to study agriculture there with a scholarship from Baron Edmond de Rothschild. They settled in the recently founded Jewish town of Rishon Lezion, where she lived for the rest of her life. Shortly after her arrival and for decades thereafter, she began to write Hebrew fiction about life in the Yishuv, making her one of the first women’s voices in the Hebrew prose tradition that would become Israeli literature. Much of her fiction adopted a primarily tragic viewpoint, clashing with the optimism of the male-dominated literary landscape of the day. Pukhachewsky also distinguished herself from much of the Hebrew literature produced in the Yishuv in that she depicted not only the life of European Jewish immigrants but also that of Yemenite Jewish men and women in her writing; this engagement reflects her close observations of the sociocultural and demographic changes taking place in the moshavot (Jewish farming communities) in the years before World War I. In 1919, she cofounded the Zionist feminist women’s organization Hit’aḥdut nashim ‘ivriyot le-shivuy zekhuyot be-erets Yisra’el (Association for the Equal Rights of Hebrew Women in the Land of Israel).