An American Avant-Garde Poet in Israel: The Unexpected Freedom in Robert Friend’s Poetry

The paper will analyze and offer historical, cultural and biographical contexts to the poetry of Robert Friend, a gay American scholar, translator and poet, and his unique voice in the Israeli literary scene of the 1950s-1960s. Born in Brooklyn and educated at Harvard, Friend settled in Jerusalem in 1950 and taught at the Hebrew University. He made a number of friends in the Israeli literary circles, and was one of the first translators of Israeli poets into English, yet his Hebrew remained rudimentary, and English was his language of oral and written communication. It was no wonder perhaps that his point of view was often that of a participant-observer.

Friend’s poetry was avant-garde for the era and could be compared to that of American Beat poets. He was in his own words ‘un abashed,’ fully open about his feelings, desires and yearnings. These included gay sexuality, as well as interest in spiritual teachings outside the confines of Judaism. Unlike Allen Ginsberg, Friend did not express pain in his poetry over the place of people who were outsiders and misunderstood. He accepted and even celebrated his difference, and seemed to feel liberated and content in the life he had built for himself in Israel, or rather the particular piece of Israel he found and even created .