Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1960, Rachel Tzvia Back relocated to Israel in 1980. She returns often to the United States to give poetry readings.
Rachel Tzvia Back’s grandfather left the Holy Land and came to America in the 1920s. She traces her family back seven generations in the land of Israel. After studying at Yale University and Temple University, she completed her doctorate at Hebrew University in post-modern American poetry.
She serves as a lecturer at Oranim College and also works in the MA Writing Program at Bar-Ilan University. The poet lives in a small village in Galilee with her husband and three children.
A sense of community
Back feels at home in Israel and is especially comfortable with small village life where she and her husband are raising their children ages 6, 11, and 14. According to Back, “Everything [in Israel] is structured to promote and sustain family life. Family time in Israel is sacred, while the culture in America doesn’t promote it.” She complains that in America there is much talk of family, but in practice family life gets short shrift. She says that her siblings who are raising their families in America envy that cultural difference.
Back gives some details that exemplify that difference. She says that everyone is expected to be home at 6:30 p.m. and have dinner together with family: “You’re supposed to be in your family and in your community, both together.” To facilitate this custom, there are no outside activities scheduled for that hour.
She also explains that her children are more independent than their American cousins. Her children go everywhere by themselves, and she therefore does not need to bother taking them anywhere: “There’s a bus that takes them back and forth from school, and they’re completely independent. My six-year-old takes herself to and from the bus and to her afterschool activities. I don’t ever pick them up. These things do not seem to happen here in America.”
Rachel Tzvia Back: The Poet
Back began writing poetry at a very early age. She admires Emily Dickinson, Charles Olson, George Oppen, and Joy Harjo. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on Susan Howe, an experimental poet often associated with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. She published the dissertation as a monograph, titled Led by Language: the Poetry and Poetics of Susan Howe.
Back does her writing in Israel but returns often to the United States to give readings. When she phones home, her husband tells her, "Wonderful things happen when you go away." The children then have the opportunity to become even more independent.
According to Back, reading poetry aloud and paying attention to line breaks help the reader understand the poem better. She adds, “I believe in poetry as music.” Her published collections include Litany and Azimuth. Her most recent publication is her collection titled The Buffalo Poems.
Another Back article: Back's "Her Hands": Grief that Shrinks and Silences
