Recent scholarship has restored the significance of late nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish writer Amy Levy (1861–89) and her corpus.Footnote 1 Levy's poem “Borderland,” a refiguring of the Song of Songs’ traditional allegory, reverses Song 5:2–6's climax, in which the Shulamite unwittingly neglects the advances of her “beloved” while he waits at the door.Footnote 2 In “Borderland,” the Shulamite “lover” assumes the initiative by visiting her “beloved,” while he is instead passive.Footnote 3 But this reversal is only one way of reading “Borderland.” The poem's erotic language means it can also be read as a rejection of the rabbinic allegory, in which the text symbolizes the relationship between God and the community of Israel. Alternatively, “Borderland” can be read as a volte-face of middle-class assumptions about the “Victorian ideal of the passionless woman.”Footnote 4 And for readers unable to decipher the complex layers of meaning, it can be read as a series of love lyrics. The diverse ways in which “Borderland” can be read reveal contiguity with “Das Hohelied” (The Song of Songs) and “Lyrisches Intermezzo” (Lyrical Interludes) by German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), texts dependent on the Song of Songs.Footnote 5 In fact, Heine was Levy's “favourite poet”;Footnote 6 “Borderland” accordingly reflects her reading of Heine and her employment of similar poetics, though not necessarily continuity or unoriginality.
Indeed, Levy's gendered refiguring of the Shulamite's role is unique, and Levy's relationship with Heine demonstrates what Dan Miron has labelled “literary contiguity.” For Miron, “contiguity … should replace … continuity. This concept suggests … fluid and unregulated contacts, even moments of close adjacency, but not containment of one entity by another, not superimposition or Gleichschaltung.”Footnote 7 “Literary contiguity” is a process by which “tangible contacts” between “players” in the “modern Jewish literary complex” are identified.Footnote 8 This article identifies “relatedness” between Heine and Levy, but also acknowledges the “differences.”Footnote 9
Amy Levy and Her World
Levy was born in 1861 into an affluent, acculturated Anglo-Jewish family. The Levy family attended the recently founded West London Reform Synagogue at Upper Berkeley Street, and maintained close social ties with the established Jewish community. At an early age Levy evidenced basic familiarity with the Jewish biblical tradition, as her analysis of King David, written for the children's magazine Kind Words, demonstrates.Footnote 10 Susan David Bernstein speculates that at a minimum, Levy had a “basic knowledge of Jewish traditions.”Footnote 11 Levy may also have had Hebrew lessons, but only attended synagogue on the major festivals, if at all, which was the norm for assimilated upper-middle-class Anglo-Jews.Footnote 12 Thus, Levy was, according to Christine Pullen, “familiar with the prayers and rituals of the Jewish faith.”Footnote 13 Equally, throughout her life, her closest friends continued to be from the Jewish community.Footnote 14 However, Levy was educated at the Brighton High School Girls’ Public Day School Trust; according to Ellen Umansky, education beyond the community was seen as “a visible symbol of Jewish adaptability.”Footnote 15 Consequently, Levy attended Newnham College, Cambridge, but did not complete her course in classical and modern languages.Footnote 16 Instead, she pursued a literary career, writing three novels: Romance of a Shop (1888), Reuben Sachs (1888), and Miss Meredith (1889).Footnote 17 She also published several essays in the Jewish Chronicle, including on the defunct ghetto in Florence,Footnote 18 “Jewish Children,” “Jewish Women,” and “Jewish Humour.”Footnote 19 Additionally, Levy produced three poetry anthologies: Xantippe (1881), A Minor Poet (1884), and A London Plane-Tree (1889).Footnote 20 These anthologies reveal Levy's engagement with neoclassicist, Sapphic, urban, pessimistic, protofeminist, and New Woman perspectives, which ensured her popularity in avant-garde literary circles.Footnote 21
The historiographical quest to identify the extent of Levy's religiosity and relationship to Judaism has led to emphasis on her corpus, in the absence of evidence. Little is known of Levy's private life, because following her suicide the majority of her private papers were “destroyed” by her parents, leaving only her calendar for 1889.Footnote 22 Indeed, looking to poems such as “A Prayer,” “Magdalen,” “Lohengrin,” and “Captivity,” Cynthia Scheinberg has claimed that Levy was intent on reappropriating the “Hebrew Scriptures … in the service of constructing a specific Anglo-Jewish identity.”Footnote 23 Similarly, Nadia Valman has pointed to the influence of Reform Judaism on Levy's Reuben Sachs. For Valman, Levy's novel is predicated on the heroine's “plight,” which is figured as a product of traditional Judaism's “pride of sex” iterated in the daily blessing: “Blessed art Thou, O Lord my God, who hast not made me a woman.”Footnote 24 Accordingly, Judith Quixano's alienation is—regurgitating the Christian evangelical critique of the tradition—a product of Anglo-Reform Judaism's ceremonialism and absence of inner spirituality:
Judith Quixano went through her devotions upheld by that sense of fitness, of obedience to law and order, which characterized her every action. But it cannot be said that her religion had any strong hold over her; she accepted it unthinkingly. These prayers, read so diligently, in a language of which her knowledge was exceedingly imperfect, these reiterated praises of an austere tribal deity, these expressions of a hope whose consummation was neither desired nor expected, what connection could they have with the personal needs, the human longings of this touchingly ignorant and limited creature?Footnote 25
Like Valman, Naomi Hetherington notes the influence of the “Reform movement” and its attempts to “modernize Jewish worship” on Reuben Sachs.Footnote 26 Equally, Pullen argues that “Levy's destiny was shaped by … Reform Judaism” and her “awareness of … the fundamental asceticism of rabbinical tradition.”Footnote 27 And lastly, among others, Iveta Jusova suggests, on the basis of Levy's urban poetry, that she frequently identified herself as an “outsider.”Footnote 28 But the lack of evidence need not lead to speculation about Levy's biography, nor should it foreclose a textual analysis of “Borderland.”
Levy, Heine, Eliot, and the Song of Songs
Levy was probably first introduced to Canticles interpretation through her reading of Heine.Footnote 29 Levy's childhood Confessions Book reveals that she counted “Heine” as one of her “favourite poets.”Footnote 30 Throughout her life Levy read, translated, and praised Heine, the Dichterjude or “Jew-poet.”Footnote 31 The socialist Eleanor Marx described Levy as “the best” translator of Heine's work she had ever known. According to Marx, Levy had an “affinity” with Heine and could be frequently found in the reading room of the British Museum translating his poetry.Footnote 32 When Ernest Radford, the husband of Levy's friend Dollie, completed his own translation of Heine, Levy immediately requested a copy.Footnote 33 The echoes of Heine appear throughout the Levy corpus.
Levy's first poetry anthology, Xantippe and Other Verse, begins with “Aus meinen grossen Schmerzen Mach’ ich die kleinen Lieder” (From the great pain of my spirit / Come the little songs), an extract from Heine's “Lyrisches Intermezzo.”Footnote 34 Levy also translated elements of “Lyrisches Intermezzo” in her second anthology, A Minor Poet. Reviewers of the anthology frequently pointed to Levy's overreliance on Heine.Footnote 35 For example, “A Cross-Road Epitaph” begins with the quotation: “Am Kreusweg wird begraben / Wer selber brachte sich um” (The suicide lies buried / Where the cross-roads pass o'er), an excerpt from Heine's poem “Am Kreusweg wird begraben” (again from “Lyrisches Intermezzo”).Footnote 36 Likewise, “A Dirge” begins with “Mein Herz, mein Herz ist traurig” (My heart, my heart is weary), taken from Heine's Buch der Lieder (Book of Songs),Footnote 37 the volume that includes “Lyrisches Intermezzo.” So obvious was Levy's debt to Heine that the poem “A Farewell” was written “After Heine,” and originally entitled “Imitation of Heine.”Footnote 38 Levy also referred in Reuben Sachs to “Ich grolle nicht” (I bear no grudge),Footnote 39 a line taken from German composer Robert Schumann's Dichterliebe, which includes sixteen of Heine's “Interludes.”Footnote 40 And in “Jewish Humour,” Levy employed an extract from Heine's Buch der Lieder, which she translated as: “Sun and moon and stars are laughing; / I am laughing, too – and dying.”Footnote 41 Levy clearly shared Heine's pessimism.Footnote 42
It is therefore hardly surprising that when Lady Katie Magnus, a family friend, invited Levy to translate Heine's poetry for Jewish Portraits (1888), she seized the opportunity.Footnote 43 Magnus also asked Levy to translate Judah Halevi's verse from Abraham Geiger's Divan des Castiliers Abu'l-Hassan Juda ha-Levi.Footnote 44 Fluent in German, Levy undertook German studies at Cambridge and between 1881 and 1885 visited Dresden, Baden, and Alsace.Footnote 45 She was already acquainted with Halevi's exilic poetry through her reading of Heine, himself a reader and translator of Halevi.
Heine's poem, “Jehuda ben Halevy,” venerates the “lamenting poet.”Footnote 46 In his tribute, Heine visualized Halevi and claimed:
Heine's homage imagined a meeting between the two:
Like Heine, Levy had written a similar homage to the tradition of exilic poetry in “Captivity,” which was first published in the Cambridge Review in 1885.Footnote 49 Scheinberg argues that the poem is “Levy's most Jewish version of being caught between two worlds, a version whose title and references to a ‘lost land’ position her more directly in line with a tradition of Jewish Diasporic poetry longing the loss of the land of Israel.”Footnote 50 “Captivity” incorporates biblical symbology to contrast the shackled “lion” with the caged “bird”:
“Captivity” speculates about the prospects of their emancipation: the “lion” would search for “the jungle in vain,” while the “bird” would return to his cage, “wrought what is stronger than iron / In fetter and bar.”Footnote 52 The animals are neither “wild thing nor tame,” but both are convinced that their homeland, however distant, is “free as the forest, and sweeter / Than woodland retreat.”Footnote 53
Levy's translations for Magnus's Jewish Portraits reveal the extent to which Halevi's exilic poetry was predicated on Canticles interpretation and its traditional dialogue between God and Israel.Footnote 54 In Levy's translation of a “marriage hymn,” for example, the Promised Land is figured as a “dove”:
The symbolic “dove” appears several times in the Song of Songs and is often figured in the rabbinic literature as either the community of Israel or the land itself. Halevi frequently likened his poetry to the “conversation between God and his banished doves” evident in “Song of Songs 2:14, 5:2, 5:12, 6:9.”Footnote 56 Similarly, in another translation, Halevi's speaker longs for the
This verse reveals the Shulamite's symbolic association with Israel. The fact that Levy's translations ensure adequate rhyme demonstrates that she understood the complex hermeneutics. Equally, the translations suggest that Levy was already experimenting with Song of Songs interpretation prior to writing “Borderland.”
The dating of Levy's poem can also be linked to her criticism of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876),Footnote 58 a novel about a young Englishman who discovers his Jewish ancestry and emigrates to Palestine. Eliot utilizes Song of Songs’ classic line (5:2), “I sleep, but my heart waketh,” to frame her character Mordecai's proto-Zionism.Footnote 59 This is the same verse that Levy would reinterpret in “Borderland.” Mordecai's yearning, “desire,” “dreams,” and passion are likened to the envisioning of the “beloved” (Song of Songs 5:2).Footnote 60 Like Levy, Eliot was fascinated with Heine, and frequently quoted him in Daniel Deronda.Footnote 61 For example, chapter 34 begins with an extract from his “Prinzessin Sabbath” (Princess Sabbath), which draws on Song of Songs’ traditional allegory: “Er ist geheissen / Israel” (He is welcomed / Israel).Footnote 62 Likewise, chapter 62 starts with Heine's verse on “fortune”:
Moreover, chapter 63 begins with a quotation from Heine's Geständnisse (Confessions): “Moses, trotz seiner Befeindung der Kunst, dennoch selber ein grosser Künstler war und den wahren Kunstlergeist besass….” (Moses, notwithstanding his invention of the art, was himself a great artist and possessed the true spirit of an artist….)Footnote 64 Eliot was more than familiar with Heine's poetry, as her article, “German Wit: Heinrich Heine” (1856), demonstrates;Footnote 65 there, she claims that Heine is “brilliant among the most brilliant” and “one of the most remarkable men of this age.”Footnote 66 Eliot also suggests that Heine's “unique German wit is half … Hebrew,” although “he and his ancestors spent their youth in German air.”Footnote 67 Levy, however, seemed to take offence to Eliot's analysis of Heine's “humour.”
Accordingly, while Levy listed “George Eliot” as one of her “favourite prose authors” in her childhood Confessions Book,Footnote 68 in “Jewish Humour” her critique is evidently directed at Eliot. She claimed that “In general circles the mention of Jewish Humour is immediately followed by that of HEINE; … For Heine, in truth, has given perfect expression to the very spirit of Jewish Humour.”Footnote 69 This comment is then clarified with the statement that “only a Jew perceives to the full the humour of another; but it is a humour so fine, so peculiar, so distinct in flavour, that we believe it impossible to impart its perception to any one not born a Jew.”Footnote 70 Similarly, in “Jewish Children” (1886) Levy argues that Eliot is incapable of understanding “the charms” of Jewish identity:
“I'll shwop!” said Jacob Alexander Cohen, as he held out the celebrated corkscrew-knife to Daniel Deronda. He spoke, we are told, in a voice “hoarse in its glibness, as if it had belonged to an aged commercial soul, fatigued with bargaining after many generations”; and was possessed of a physique which “supported a precocity that would have shattered a Gentile of his years.” “The marvellous Jacob” in his red stocking and velveteen knickerbockers; Adelaide Rebekah with her “miniature crinoline and monumental features”; her fine name and Sabbath frock of braided amber; Eugenie Esther who “carries on her teething intelligently” and looks about her with such precocious interest; these three little persons are drawn, it must be owned, with considerable shrewdness and humour, though with an absence of tenderness … The rather laboured jocoseness, the straining after pompous epigram which characterise George Eliot's later manner seem singularly out of place in her description of the young Cohens. She has caught, indeed, the humours; but has failed to catch the charms of Jewish childhood.Footnote 71
Additionally, in “The Jew in Fiction” (1886) Levy suggests that a “serious treatment” of Anglo-Jewry is required as a counter to Eliot's idealized Jewish selves.Footnote 72 Equally, Reuben Sachs provides an alternative to Eliot's idealistic portrayal of Anglo-Jewry with its “boxes in the hall, ready packed and labeled Palestine.”Footnote 73 Instead, the majority of Anglo-Jews in Reuben Sachs are unspiritual, legalistic, and materialistic.Footnote 74 The convert Bertie Lee-Harrison is, according to one Jewish character, “shocked at finding us so little like the people in Daniel Deronda.”Footnote 75 Likewise, Leo derides Daniel Deronda, stating: “I have always been touched … by the immense good faith with which George Eliot carried out that elaborate misconception of hers.”Footnote 76 Accordingly, as Iveta Jusova and Dan Reyes note, Levy's novel suggests that her fictional characters are “disinterested in the project of the Jewish resettlement in the Middle East.”Footnote 77 Eliot's use of Heine and her clumsy attempts to portray Anglo-Jewry were obviously problematic for Levy. Thus, it is possible that “Borderland” was written with similar critique in mind, perhaps as an intertextual dialogue and a “subversion” of Eliot's writing on Heine and the Anglo-Jewish community.Footnote 78 This could explain the motives behind the publication of “Borderland,” though not the contiguities with Heine.
Levy's “Borderland”
“Borderland” predominantly focuses on Song of Songs 5:2–6.Footnote 79 The poem plays on the moment in Song 5:2 at which the male lover (Solomon) “knocketh, saying, Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled.” In the biblical verse, by the time the Shulamite responds, her “beloved” has “withdrawn” (5:5). In “Borderland,” however, the roles are reversed. The poem begins with the female lover outside seeking to enter, while the passive male awaits her “presence.”Footnote 80 The female lover enters, initiating the sequence, while the male, longing for intimacy, is helpless. Consequently, the female embraces the male speaker amid the heat of a summer's night. There is, nevertheless, no consummation, as it is merely a reverie. Like in the Song of Songs, the yearning continues as the “beloved” has “gone” (5:6). In a reversal of roles, instead of Song 5:2's statement: “I sleep, but my heart waketh,” Levy's inert male lover asks: “AM I waking, am I sleeping?” This question indicates ambiguity, because the “heart does not “waketh,” but exists in “dream-rapture,” “Half in swoon” between “waking” and “sleeping”:
“Borderland” thus captures what Christopher Meredith calls the “blurring of distinctions between the anticipation and enjoyment of love.”Footnote 82 Similarly, the poem exploits the uncertainty evident within the biblical text concerning “exactly who is doing the talking, much less what sex the person is.”Footnote 83 Even classical midrashic interpretations of the Song of Songs reveal that the Shulamite woman can be either the community of Israel or God and that the allegorical identities are anything but fixed.Footnote 84 Indeed, Levy's play on 5:2–6 reverses the Shulamite's earlier statement: “By night on my couch I sought him whom my soul loveth” (3:1). Alternatively, the male lover is assigned the stationary role. Thus, the female's “presence” means that “love” is necessarily feminine and “soft as death.” This contrasts “love” in 8:6, which is figured as masculine and “strong as death” (8:6). Like in the Song of Songs, the feminine perspective is central.
Indeed, the Shulamite's role is unique because sexual intimacy in the Bible is often elucidated from a male standpoint. According to Rachel Adler, of the eleven biblical instances of women being subjects of the words “to love,” five occur in the Song of Songs.Footnote 85 For Adler, it is only in the Song of Songs that women's desire is considered acceptable. Adler therefore claims that the text is “antipatriarchal” as readers experience the Shulamite's perspective.Footnote 86 Likewise, for Phyllis Trible it is the Shulamite who “initiates” sex. This is evident in the Shulamite's demand: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy caresses are better than wine” (1:2). Equally, it is the Shulamite who summons her lover (8:14), and who is also “keeper of the vineyards” (1:6).Footnote 87 Trible argues that the Song of Songs confirms the “the mutuality of the sexes. There is no male dominance, no female subordination, and no stereotyping of either sex. The woman is independent, fully the equal of the man.”Footnote 88 Athalya Brenner even claims that “There is female superiority” in the Song of Songs.Footnote 89 Levy's poem certainly subverts conventional gender stereotypes.
In “Borderland,” the female “presence”—“It is she”—takes the initiative, while the male is passive. “Borderland” therefore exploits the way in which the Song of Songs, for Trible, “reverses the meaning of the male-female relationship.”Footnote 90 Levy frequently used a masculine voice to transcend her own sexuality. Elizabeth Jay claims that it was common in the Victorian period for women to rely “upon male voices for legitimation.”Footnote 91 According to Deborah Epstein Nord, Levy deployed her poetry to “achieve impersonality, to use another's voice—a man's voice.”Footnote 92 Likewise, Pullen suggests that “Levy's adoption of a male voice … was a device that she employed primarily to create a distance from [her] own female identity.”Footnote 93 The sexual ambiguity of the Song of Songs and its “voices [that] do not conform to masculine and feminine stereotypes” accommodated Levy's reinterpretation of gender labels.Footnote 94
The passionate exchanges in “Borderland” are at home among the range of voices in the Song of Songs. Indeed, the “night” setting relies on the “nocturnal” sequences primarily of 5:2–6 and to a lesser extent 3:1–5.Footnote 95 The scent of the female lover, figured as “odorous” and in the shedding of “perfume,” relies on references to the Shulamite's enticing aroma. This can be seen in 5:5, where her “fingers [drip] with liquid myrrh,” and equally in 2:13, 4:10, and 4:14. The symbology of the “heart” is illustrated in the male's arousal as the female enters the bedroom: “My heart … saith, / It is she.” This line relies on a similar metaphor in 4:9, which prefigures the nighttime exchange of 5:2–6: “Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my betrothed.” Comparable use of the romantic symbol of the “heart” can be found in 3:11. Lastly, “Borderland” climaxes with the female's entrance as “an unseen presence hovering, / Round, above, in the dusky air: / A downy bird, with an odorous wing.” This verse conjures the biblical text's figuring of the Shulamite as a “dove,” evident in the male's plea (5:2): “Open to me, my sister, my dove.” Analogous metaphors can be located in 1:15 and 2:14.
Accordingly, “Borderland” can be read in a way that maintains the traditional thematic. The “unseen presence hovering” symbolizes the “dove,” traditionally the community of Israel (Keneset Yisra'el) and the “female” bride.Footnote 96 Comparably, the speaker, the male, assumes the role of Solomon, who in the rabbinic allegory represents God.Footnote 97 Indeed, in the first complete Jewish commentary on the Song of Songs, a sixth-century Targum,Footnote 98 “‘The beloved’ is the Lord; ‘the loved one’ is the Congregation of Israel.”Footnote 99 This interpretation flourished in the golden age of medieval Spain. Halevi and others emphasized the feminine nature of Keneset Yisra'el, “calling out in female terms” for “a renewed relationship with God.”Footnote 100 However, if “Borderland” is read in the context of its erotic or romantic language, the traditional perspective is void.Footnote 101 The theological premise is also missed if the poem is read as a reversal of contemporaneous stereotypes about the “passionless” woman of middle-class imagination.Footnote 102
The interpretive layers of the poem thus reveal contiguity with Heine. Levy's refiguring of Song of Songs is an original innovation, but like Heine's imago, “Borderland” mocks and confuses readers. Similar to “Das Hohelied” the poem's use of abstract language blurs the line between the rational and the irrational.Footnote 103 Therefore, while it will become evident that “Borderland” reconstitutes themes from Heine's “Das Hohelied” and “Lyrisches Intermezzo,” it is equally clear that Levy altered the parameters to produce an original verse. In this way “Borderland” can be read as a gendered approach to what Assaf Yedidya defines as the “anti-rabbinical tone of many pioneers of the Wissenschaft des Judentums.”Footnote 104 Hence, “Borderland” should not be understood merely as the product of Heine, even if it bound up with Levy's adulation for “The Poet stretched on his couch of pain.”Footnote 105 Rather, the contiguous nature of the comparison suggests that Levy's poem reveals “evolution.”Footnote 106 But of course “continuities [can] exist,” although they are of “secondary importance” to the contiguities and “tangentialities.”Footnote 107 The links between the two in this instance are what Miron refers to as “borderline,” “very fine,” and “barely noticed.”Footnote 108 These are “contacts” that until now “have not been detected.”Footnote 109 Their contiguity rests on the fact that Levy employed Heine's methods and similarly focused on the Song of Songs, even if the context, language, and product differed.Footnote 110
Heine's “Das Hohelied”
Heinrich Heine was well versed in the Hebrew Scriptures, and was one of the cofounders, along with Eduard Gans and Leopold Zunz, of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (the Society for Jewish Culture and Science). Although he converted to Lutheranism, Heine's conversion was intended to overcome the legal restrictions on Prussian Jews working within academia, as “the ticket of admission into European culture.”Footnote 111 Abraham Geiger claimed that Heine was a “gifted son” never fully lost to the ancestral faith.Footnote 112 Indeed, according to Klaus Weimar “something remained that could not be changed by changing the social collective, something presocial, extrasocial: the biological substrate of anything societal—the body.”Footnote 113
Heine was adept at presenting poetry suitable for a diverse audience, despite the themes containing offensive underpinnings for both Christian and Jewish religionists. In “Das Hohelied” Heine wrote: “just as the Jewish King Solomon sang the praises of the Church in the Song of Songs via the image of a black, ardent girl, so that the Jews would not quite notice, so did I myself do just the opposite in countless songs: I sang the praises of the rational, via the image of a white, cold virgin who pulls me towards her.”Footnote 114 Heine suggested that Christian readers assuming they were reading an allegory of God's love for the Church were mistaken. Equally, Heine mocked Jewish readers of the Song of Songs, who, by accepting the traditional allegory, were “ignorant” of its base content.Footnote 115 “Das Hohelied” is thus predicated solely on the erotics of the biblical text.Footnote 116 This is what Willi Goetschel calls “Heine's poetry of … reason,” demanding “emancipation of the senses and the flesh.”Footnote 117 Indeed, in “Das Hohelied”
Accordingly, the poem can be read as either a religious allegory or a rationalist homage to the beauty of the Shulamite.Footnote 119 In this latter interpretive reading the subtext is concealed, as it would later be in “Borderland,” within simplistic verse. This suited Levy as, according to Rebecca Styler, “simpler” poetry “was regarded as suitably feminine” and resonated with “notions of womanly character.”Footnote 120
Late-Victorian women writers frequently concealed religious subtexts in otherwise conventional poems. This was necessary for Levy as her surname inescapably marked her out as a Jewish author.Footnote 121 Indeed, when the manuscript of A London Plane-Tree was passed to Macmillan for review it was rejected on the grounds that according to the anonymous reviewer: “These are all very puny pieces—more like the Jew's harp than any more resourceful instrument.”Footnote 122 As Ana Parejo Vadillo has suggested, this is why the publication of the anthology was accompanied by J. Bernard Partridge's drawing of “The Temple Church,” which sought to “eradicate” the Jewishness of A London Plane-Tree and instead was to create a “Christian-centered urbanism.”Footnote 123 But Levy's poetics were not solely based on toning down the obviously “Jewish” elements. In “Jewish Humour,” Levy eulogized the “quality of the tribal humour” in Heine's poetry.Footnote 124 As evidenced in her critique of Eliot, Levy imagined that humour was a dynamic of Jewish identity indecipherable to “any one not born a Jew”:Footnote 125
As far as we can judge we should say, that only a Jew perceives … the humour of another; … The most hardened Agnostic deserter from the synagogue enjoys its pungency, where the zealous alien convert to Judaism tastes nothing but a little bitterness. … The trappings and suites of our humour must vanish with the rest; but that is no reason why what is essential of it should not remain to us as a heritage of the ages too precious to be lightly lost; a defence and a weapon wrought for us long ago by hands that ceased not from their labour. If we leave off saying Shibboleth let us at least employ its equivalent in the purest University English.Footnote 126
Shibboleth (“flowing stream” or “ear of grain”) was a password used by the Gileadites in Judges 12:5–6 to identify the Ephraimites by their different pronunciation. The Ephraimites dropped the “sh” making shibboleth sibbolet.Footnote 127 For Scheinberg shibboleth is a literary means of crypto-Jewish dialogue and a “marker of identity” Levy hoped would allow Jews to recognize each other without appearing “Jewish to non-Jews.”Footnote 128 Moreover, Scheinberg argues that “there are often markers of Jewish identity in many of Levy's poems, her own ways of ‘saying Shibboleth’ to those who know how to identify that term.”Footnote 129 Levy assumed, Scheinberg suggests, that “only Jews can understand each other.”Footnote 130 Similarly, Pullen compares Levy to the mid-Victorian writer, Adelaide Procter, who was adept at “sugaring the pill.” Indeed, Procter was able to convey “a political message and still [able to] remain within the bounds of mid-nineteenth-century literary convention,” thus creating the “impression of being ‘exactly what women's poetry … was expected to be: pious, flowery, sentimental and sweet.’”Footnote 131 Equally, Bernstein suggests that Levy “treasures elements of Jewish humor that defy translation, ‘the dear vulgar, mongrel words’ that only the ‘we’ of her Jewish Chronicle audience can comprehend …, whereby a cornucopia of unspecified wordplay … conveys a special humor that non-Jews cannot disparage because they cannot ‘crack’ its language.”Footnote 132 Such “markers” and “wordplay” are evident in “Borderland.”
The contiguities between “Das Hohelied” and “Borderland” are thus evident in the diverse readings these poems can elicit. “Das Hohelied” is essentially what Paul Peters labels a “rehabilitation of the original impulse of the Canticle canticlorum,” a return to the raw physicality of the biblical text and rejection of its rabbinic allegory.Footnote 133 By emphasizing the erotic and downplaying the religious, Heine encouraged a more literal reading and was retrospectively able to claim: “This is not an abstract poem.”Footnote 134 According to Perrey, in his rational approach to the Song of Songs Heine was aware of the “conflict between explicit eroticism and implicit allegory.”Footnote 135 “Das Hohelied” emphasizes the beauty of the Shulamite: “the woman is the Song of Songs.”Footnote 136 For Heine, “The woman's body is a poem,” her “verses” are “sleek, white limbs,” her “neck” is “bare,” her “breasts are rosebuds,” her vagina is a “beautiful place,” she possesses “beautifully rhyming lips,” and she is “unspeakably adorable.”Footnote 137 This focus on the Shulamite's body removes her from the allegorical context. However, a surface reading of “Das Hohelied” implies throughout that the Song of Songs was written by “The Lord God,” “highly excited,” and driven by the “Spirit.”Footnote 138 Such a reading assumes the basis of a “divine idea” and that the “woman” is a product of the “creator” and his sculpting.Footnote 139 This perspective accepts that the speaker will “sing praises to thee, O Lord,” “worship … from the dust,” and “sink, O Lord” in reverence to “your song.”Footnote 140 But Heine was mocking his readers. The poem is a rejection of the traditional allegory and an affirmation of the rational. For Perrey “the inversion is perfect: what, by readers of Heine's poems, was perceived as an expression of worldly love … has at its centre the Divine Virgin, and what by readers of the Song of Songs was assumed to represent Solomon's love for the Church was rather, Heine suggests, for a real woman.”Footnote 141
In comparison, while Levy's gendered reading draws on Heine's imago of the Shulamite “woman,” the subtext does not foreclose a reading of the rabbinic allegory, but refigures it.Footnote 142 Levy's Shulamite accordingly initiates the dream sequence, contrary to 5:2–6. Indeed, Levy's female is the “dove,” “hovering, / Round, above, in the dusky air: / A downy bird, with an odorous wing.” Obviously, the “dove” is an allusion to the community of Israel, but the focus is on the exclamation: “It is she.” This comment can therefore be read simply as the introduction of the female lover (as in “Das Hohelied”), or theologically, as corporate Israel, and thus a gendered refiguring of the traditional interpretation. Likewise, while Heine's subtext glorifies the female form and is a corporeal exercise, it can still be read as a theological allegory.
Heine's “Lyrisches Intermezzo” is often compared with the Song of Songs. Perrey claims that Heine's reliance on the biblical text is “astonishing.” For Perrey, Heine's verses read as homilies to the Shulamite woman.Footnote 143 These poems, their lyrics and style, help to inform the composition of “Borderland.” Indeed, Levy's poem, like the “Interludes,” is built around a dream sequence, grounded in the night and the heat of the summer, based on mutual love, the perfume is intoxicating, and the imagery of the dove is essential. These are not simple continuities, however. Levy used these themes to refigure the Song of Songs.
First, the dream setting: dreams are used in nineteen of the sixty-nine “Lyrical Interludes.” Dreams are an opportunity to visualize the Shulamite. She is seen “but lately in a dream,” “oft in dreams,” in “musing and dreaming,” in a “dream of old,” and “EACH night in dreams.”Footnote 144 Similarly, the speaker is “dreaming of a palm-tree,” a metaphor for the Shulamite (Song of Songs 7:7), as well as of “the fairest princess seen.”Footnote 145 Certainly, in dreams he can “hear thee gently calling,” echoing 5:6.Footnote 146 In the same way, the night is a constant within “Lyrisches Intermezzo” and is referred to on sixteen occasions. The Shulamite is “waiting for the night,” “the moon is her own lover” (in 6:10 she is “fair as the moon”), and she only visits “by night.”Footnote 147 Similarly, as in Song of Songs 3:1, the “night-time” is “better,” tales are told on a “summer's night,” the speaker sings “by night” his “songs of love,” and he yearns for the “endless night.”Footnote 148 Equally, a number of the “Interludes” are grounded in the summer. There is singing “through summer hours,” the “summer days are heating,” and the “summer” is “gleaming.”Footnote 149 Moreover, the speaker yearns for “summer in your heart” and “the ruddy rays of summer” ensue.Footnote 150 Love is the single most consistent theme and is referred to more times than there are “Interludes.” The symbolic “roses” (2:1) confess “warm love,” the Shulamite is “thou loved and loveliest one,” “my life's great love,” and will be loved “till life be past.”Footnote 151 Also, perfume is a frequent marker of sensuality in the “Lyrical Interludes.” The Shulamite is “perfuming,” the bedroom is “sweet-perfumed,” dreams bring “sweet enchanted scents,” metaphorical roses (echoing 2:1) are “soft-perfumed,” and “Love's sweetest airs” are prolonged.Footnote 152
Decisively, the “dove” is a recurrent symbol in the “Lyrical Interludes.” The third begins, “For the dove or the sun, rose or lily sweet growing,” linking the verse to the Song of Songs.Footnote 153 Indeed, the Shulamite is “my sister, my love, my dove” (5:2), she is “clear as the sun” (6:10), she is the “rose of Sharon,” and she is “lily among the thorns” (2:1–2). Correspondingly, in Lyrical Interlude 50 the “dove” is required to relate her “experience in love,” just as in 38, songs are “flight upwinging” and “fluttering.”Footnote 154 Equally, in 57 the narrator laments: “Oh that I were a birdling.”Footnote 155 Similarly, the Shulamite's “eyes are doves” (1:16) and she is the “dove … in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the cliff” (2:14). Thus, Heine's “dove” is a marker linking the “Interludes” to the Song of Songs. However, his “dove” is solely a metaphor for the Shulamite woman, not corporate Israel, even if the verses can be read this way.
By contrast, Levy's softly feathered “hovering” dove, with its fanning and perfumed wings, can be an allusion to the Shulamite and carries traditional meanings. Levy's “dove” can also be read as symbolic of the community of Israel. In this way, while Heine mocks his readers who assume the traditional allegory, Levy's poem remodels its traditional meaning. “Borderland” is nonetheless equally mocking. Those readers who assume it is merely a hypersentimental poem will miss its complex layers.
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“Borderland” is a refiguring of the Song of Songs that demonstrates contiguity with Heine. His “Das Hohelied” and “Lyrisches Intermezzo” inform some of the themes and style of Levy's poem. While these are contiguities, of course, the languages and contexts are different. Moreover, Levy's gendered rereading of Song of Songs is unique. Thus, it is not a case of simple continuity between Heine and Levy.
Miron's model of “literary contiguity” allows for the fact that the links between “Jewish literatures” are not necessarily “linear,” “chronological,” or “causal.” Indeed, according to Miron's model, there are connecting elements that need not marginalize the “diffuse spatial” contexts.Footnote 156 Rather than implying a system of simplistic continuity, Miron's “contiguity” adds nuance and is a “corrective” to assumptions of teleology.Footnote 157 This approach allows for Levy's poetry to bear the imprint of Heine, and still be original in its own right. Thus, comparison between the two need not marginalize “their own experiences of alienation.”Footnote 158 Accordingly, Miron's “literary contiguity” underscores what Sheila Jelen calls the “‘winks’ and ‘nods’ of writers from disparate places and writing in different languages”Footnote 159 —“winks” and “nods” that are often missed. Heine was adept at “counternarrative,” “exposing reality,” and “counterhistory,”Footnote 160 and Levy too seems to have utilized these methods, though of course for different reasons.
Research into Levy's life, milieu, and religiosity is hindered by the destruction of her personal papers.Footnote 161 But her poetry, when analysed as text (as opposed to assuming it can shed light on Levy's biography), continues to be a wellspring of diverse perspectives and new lines of inquiry that, like Heine's poesie, transcends history.Footnote 162 The link is not mere continuity between writers; rather, there are subtle contiguities between the two that are not immediately apparent.
