Nurit Zarchi – Writing from Childhood’s Rooms

From Outsider to The Sad Ambitious Girls of the Province

Abstract

This paper presents the cradle of the poetic world of Hebrew poet and writer Nurit Zarchi. The methodology is comparative, linking Zarchi’s children stories to her stories and essays for adults, and discussing her work as a female writer in relation to feminist writings by Virginia Woolf, Hélène Cixous and Barbara Christian. The paper follows Zarchi’s development through her stories and essays, from her first writings to 2007. The main focus of the paper is the woman as an artist. In her early story Meshosim (“Palpi”), Zarchi presents a feminine alternative to the male Hebrew Bildungsroman or to the Biblical stories of becoming a prophet. In her work, motherhood does not contradict being an artist. In her novel Wonderful Tino, using the myth of Demeter and Persephone, Zarchi views motherhood as a source of a fertile yet dangerous symbiosis. In her stories and essays, Zarchi presents rooms of childhood – real and metaphoric – as the source of her poetic world, with flight as a symbol for her feminine creative freedom. A vital place in these childhood rooms and in the mother-daughter interrelationship is attributed to language, books, and reading. In these rooms, myths and well-known stories are recounted, reconstructed, and rewritten.