A Jewish Poet on the Move: Movement and Dislocation in Shirley Kaufman's Poetry

Shirley Kaufman (b. 1923) is an American-Israeli poet. Born in Seattle to a family who immigrated from Eastern Europe, then living in San Francisco for many year, until she immigrated to Jerusalem in 1973. Her poetry is a poetry of dislocation and movement. In an interview, she gave Chana Bloch in 1998 she said when considering her book Claims (1984): 'It had to do with my sense of dislocation as compared to my grandparents' sense of dislocation. They came from Eastern Europe to Seattle and never learned to speak any language but Yiddish, and I was having such difficulty learning Hebrew in Israel. ' This sense of dislocation and movement to and from the US and Israel (she claims in a different interview that she always travels between the two countries having daughters who lives in the US) is very apparent in her poetry. Even when considering her books' titles the movement is ostensible – from her first book The Floor Keeps Turning (1970), through her 1979 book From One Life to Another, to her last book so far Ezekiel's Wheels (2009), that even starts with the poem 'Prologue: Where Am I?' which its first line are: 'I'm not sure/ I don't know where/ I'm going anymore.' In my paper, I would like to concentrate on two aspects of the movements in Kaufman's poetry: on the one hand, I would like to concentrate on the actual them of mobility and dislocation as it is depicted in poems concerning her family immigration to the US and her own moving to Jerusalem; on the other hand, I would like to focus on poems that thematically doesn't directly speak of movement, but uses metaphors which illustrates her sense of being out of place.