page_title: Elisheva Bikhovski
section_title: Hebrew education
hierarchical_section_title: Elisheva Bikhovski / Hebrew education
caption_attribution_description: English: Cover of a book of poems in russian of Elisheva Bichovsky published in 1919 עברית: עטיפת ספר שירים רוסי של אלישבע מ-1919, תחת שם העט "א. לישבע"
context_page_description: Elisheva Bikhovski — was a Russian-Israeli poet, writer, literary critic and translator, often known simply by her adopted Biblical Hebrew name Elishéva. Her Russian Orthodox father, Ivan Zhirkov, was a village teacher who later became a bookseller and textbook publisher; her mother was descended from Irish Catholics who had settled in Russia after the Napoleonic Wars. Elisheva wrote most of her works in Hebrew, and also translated English and Hebrew poetry into Russian.
  On the death of her mother in 1891, she moved to Moscow with her aunt, an older sister of her mother, where she lived surrounded by the English language and culture. Though not culturally Jewish, she became the classmate of Jewish girls who introduced her to their culture and traditions, and she began to write poetry in 1907. Not at first differentiating between Hebrew and Yiddish as the “language of the Jews, ” she began studying Yiddish — which, she wrote, because of its kinship to other European languages, especially German, she found easy to understand.
context_section_description: Elisheva recalls in her memoir that already in elementary school she had become familiar with names of places that featured in adventure books for young people, including several Latin American cities and Galveston, Texas. Her interest in Hebrew was kindled after she chanced upon a Hebrew-language newspaper and saw an advertisement for a steamship company recommended as an easy, convenient way to cross the Atlantic Ocean. At that time Galveston was a major port of entry to the United States for European emigrants, and with the aid of a German-language textbook for scholars of Biblical Hebrew, she was able to puzzle out first the name of Galveston and later the names of other geographical locations from which telegrams were sent for newspaper publication, such as London, Saint Petersburg and Berlin. But except for the datelines at the tops of news stories, she was unable to comprehend anything from that newspaper. Eventually, she writes, someone explained that there were two separate “Jewish” languages, both written in the same letters but very, very different in vocabulary and grammar.
  Thus it was that in 1913 she began studying Hebrew through evening classes at the “Общество распространения правильных сведений о евреях и еврействе”, Obshchestvo rasprostraneniya pravil'nykh svedeniy o yevreyakh i yevreystve (“Society for the dissemination of correct information about Jews and Judaism”), founded in 1906 by a group of Jewish public figures in Moscow that included Uri Nissan Gnessin (1879–1913), Yosef Haim Brenner (1881–1921), Echiel Tschlenow (1864–1918) and her future husband, Simeon Bikhovski (1880–1932), who also began the publishing house Nisyonot (“Experiments”) in that year. For the first three months she had a young teacher whom she characterized as “both incredibly gifted and infinitely devoted to his cause.” The lessons were conducted by the direct method of “Hebrew through Hebrew”, mainly through oral instruction and without a textbook.
  “From the first lesson, I left with a precise knowledge of only two Hebrew words, but of the truth of this knowledge I did not have the slightest doubt. I know what it means when the teacher turns to his pupils and asks, “אתם מבינים”, Atem mevinim? (‘Do you understand?’). I had not seen the Hebrew letters yet, and only learned the sounds by ear. But this knowledge — as well as what was added over time in these lessons — was solid and thorough. It was systematic and correct knowledge that was impossible for me to lose.”
  Although that teacher was popular with his pupils, he aroused suspicion for going about in Moscow with a light summer coat and without galoshes. He had invited some of his students, who did not know enough Hebrew to be able to study on their own, to take Russian-language lessons in the Tanakh, or Jewish scriptures. The lessons, sporadic and conducted at the homes of various students, led to the group's being perceived as a new and possibly dangerous revolutionary group, and arrests and an inquiry followed. Lacking the required “право жительства”, pravo zhitel'stva (right of residence) in the capital, the teacher was regarded as living there illegally and was forced to leave Moscow, but Elisheva continued to learn Hebrew off and on during the next two years.
  On the death of her father in 1917, Elisheva returned to Ryazan, the city of her birth. With that year's fall of the Russian monarchy, she witnessed street demonstrations “in celebration of freedom”, which had been forbidden under the former regime. In one of these demonstrations, she participated with a group of Jewish youths, marching in an orderly way under the new national flag singing Hatikvah, a modified version of which eventually became Israel’s national anthem.
  In Ryazan, with some sleuthing and the help of a local rabbi, she was led to a scholar in an attic room who used to tutor boys in reciting the Jewish prayer book, the Siddur. This teacher was very young but with a thick, curly black beard, who combined, she wrote, “a taste for biblical grandeur with childlike naïveté.” After she demonstrated her a
caption: Elisheva's first published poems in Russian, with the illustrations of Ben-Zion Zuckerman (1904–1992).
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