An Unimportant Incident

Elisheva Bikhovsky (or “Elisheva”) was an ethnic Russian, non-Jewish Hebrew poet, and novelist born Elizaveta Zhirkov. Encountering Hebrew at first through chance glimpses at newspaper ads in the Jewish press, she began her writing career as a translator of Yiddish and Hebrew fiction into Russian and was a Russian-language poet in her own right on Jewish themes. In 1925, she moved to Palestine to take part in the nascent modern Hebrew–language cultural scene in Tel Aviv, and she met with significant acclaim as the “Ruth of the Volga” (although she never actually converted to Judaism) by fellow literati and the general populace alike. Her positive reception was short lived, however, and she lived in poverty for most of her final years. Later critics, on the contrary, have praised Elisheva for enriching Hebrew literature of the era with the starkly cosmopolitan themes of her writing, the stylistic innovation carried over from futurist and acmeist Russian poetry, and, perhaps most important, the feminist perspective she brought into all of her work.