Lital Levy's Poetic Trespass joins a small but steadily growing group of studies dedicated to the intricate, intertwined relationship between Hebrew and Arabic in the cultural production space of Israel/Palestine. Earlier studies include Ammeil Alcalay's After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Nancy Berg's Exile from Exile: Israeli Writers from Iraq (Albany State University Press, 1996); Rachel Feldhay Brennner's Inextricably Bonded: Israeli Arab and Jewish Writers Revisioning Culture (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003); Gil Hochberg's In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (Princeton University Press, 2007), Yaron Peleg's Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination (Cornell University Press, 2005), and Ella Shohat's groundbreaking Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (University of Texas Press, 1989).

Elegantly written and convincingly argued, Poetic Trespass promises to be of great interest to students of Modern Hebrew and Modern Arabic literatures as well as to scholars of comparative literature, translation studies, Jewish studies, and postcolonial studies. The book traces the intimate relationship between Hebrew and Arabic since the turn of the twentieth century in Israel/Palestine, as it examines interlingual exchanges in poetry, prose, and translation works of Jews and Palestinians writing from the early years of Zionist settlements in Palestine to the present.

Structured around close readings of both canonical and lesser-known literary texts written in Hebrew, Arabic, and “in between” these two languages, Poetic Trespass demonstrates literature's capacity to trespass otherwise carefully and tightly guarded borders between people, histories, memories, legacies, traditions, and languages. The book's introduction offers a particularly useful historical account, situating the interchange between Hebrew and Arabic as a matter of opening up an alternative poetic space—alternative, that is, to the hostile and sharply divided political space in which the majority of Jews and non-Jewish Arabs in Israel live today.

The introduction reminds us that despite the fact that both Hebrew and Arabic are Israel's official languages, the actual status of Arabic within Israeli political and public space remains inferior: “Hebrew is the public language of state and society, while Arabic is largely relegated to private use behind closed doors” (4). Furthermore, if Arabic remains a highly suspect language, given that it is identified as the “language of the enemy,” Hebrew enjoys the elevated status of a spiritual language and a national asset, given its long historical status as a “Jewish language,” or better yet, the Jewish language par excellence. It is within this contested and aggravated context that Levy's depiction of Arabic's status within Hebrew literature and culture more broadly, as “both a model and a foil” (5), gains its great political importance.

The bulk of the book is dedicated to close readings of two distinct groups of works: the first, texts written by Palestinian citizens of Israel (“Palestinian Israelis”) and the second, texts written by Israeli Jews of Arab and North African descent (“Mizrahim”) despite the fact that these two populations have little direct interaction in everyday life in Israel. If there is little actual daily exchange between these two populations and their dominant languages (Hebrew and Arabic), Poetic Trespass highlights the power of literary imagination to transgress, or at least manipulate, the political boundaries separating Israeli Jews and Palestinian Israelis, presenting us in turn with other, more hopeful and creative possibilities. The central theoretical presupposition of the book is, accordingly, that literature does not merely represent reality but that it has the capacity to reimagine or even recreate language. In the specific case of Modern Hebrew literature, Levy suggests: “Arabic and Hebrew are bound together in a continuous state of creative tension, generating metalinguistic discourses through performative deployments of language […] each [language] redefined through the other; in the process they become dialogized” (12).

Poetic Trespass is divided into three parts. The first part, “Historical Visions and Elisions,” revisits the formation of Modern Hebrew language and literature, highlighting the role of Arabic in the revival of Hebrew. It accounts for the Zionist attitudes towards Arabic from the prestate period to the present and demonstrates how the Ashkenazic literary establishment of the prestate years created a Eurocentric narrative of Hebrew modernity that casts the history and literary production of Mizrahim as radically “other” and “lesser.” The second part, “Bilingual Entanglements,” focuses on the Hebrew and Arabic literary writings of Palestinian Israeli writer Emile Habiby (1922–1996) and Iraqi Jewish writer Samir Naqqash (1938–2004). This section pays close attention to bilingualism, suggesting that in both the works of Habiby and Naqqash, the practice of writing in between and across Hebrew and Arabic results in the creation of not only a counter-hegemonic poetic but also an explicitly political language. The result is no less than the invention of a new local idiom. The third part, “Afterlives of Languages,” addresses the question of language in the Hebrew poetry and prose of contemporary Mizrahi writers, and pays attention to the intersections of recent Mizrahi and Palestinian Israeli political discourses.

Altogether the book engages with a large group of writers, including Ḥayim N. Bialik (known as the Israeli “national poet”), Palestinian Israeli writers Anton Shammas and Salman Masalha, and Mizrahi writers Erez Bitton, Sami Shalom Chertit, Sami Michael, Eli Amir, Shimon Ballas, Ronit Matalon and others. Through these careful readings, bilingualism emerges as a space of poetic freedom, creativity, and remapping of an otherwise over-determined, antagonistic and violent political reality.

The literary dialogues and cross-lingual interactions that the book situates historically and charts very well do not present us with a naive literary utopia. But they do offer a new language of sorts. Perhaps not one that can directly or pragmatically lead us out of the current political reality in which Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians find themselves today in Israel/Palestine and elsewhere, but one that opens up the “zone of poetic trespass, where impossibility is the essential condition of creation” (297). In a political reality dominated by despair and lack of cross-cultural exchange, reading a book like Poetic Trespass, with its great belief in language's own capacity to transgress and transform reality, offers a much-needed sense of hope.