This study focuses on bold – yet often overlooked – expressions of sexuality in David Vogel’s 1929 volume of poems Lifnei hasha’ar he’afel (Before the Dark Gate). Emphasizing the tenderness and passivity in Vogel’s poems, critics have missed the violent and active facet of the very same poems. Indeed, focusing on sexuality reveals a surprising resemblance between Vogel’s poems and his prose fiction: what is visible and explicit in his prose simply becomes more subtle and suggestive in his poetry. Whether overt or covert, the sexual violence in the poems is directed at the female figure, yet this figure represents a reversal of power relations: inferiority becomes a source of power. Thus, the poems provide an innovative observation of gender issues, which culminates in Vogel’s writing in the first person through the female consciousness.
The poems, moreover, reveal a surprising connection between sexuality, particularly female sexuality, and traditional Judaism – contrary to critics’ claims that there are no Jewish elements in Vogel’s works. This connection sheds light on an issue that has been extensively discussed in literary criticism: Vogel’s relationship with Zionism, his place in the Hebrew literary field of his time, and his identity as a writer who chose the Hebrew language while blatantly shying away from Zionist content. Through sexuality, particularly jouissance and masochism, Vogel’s Before the Dark Gate challenges both the Aryan paradigm that views the Jewish male as inferior and feminine and the Zionist paradigm that adopted anti-Semitic views by striving to make the Jew masculine. The tender and lyrically sorrowful poems conceal a wild sexuality that suggests gender flexibility, far beyond the one-dimensional concept of gender and ideology.
