“The Soul of Raw Materials:” Jewish Mysticism in Debora Vogel’s Modernist Poetics

Abstract

This paper examines the literary prose of the Yiddish poet Debora Vogel (1900–1942) and shows that her modernist poetry was deeply informed by Jewish mystical traditions. Through close analysis of Vogel’s 1935 collection Akatsyes Blien (Acacias Bloom), I show that Vogel’s systematic use of Hebrew-derived terms reveals a deliberate engagement with Jewish mystical concepts. Crucially, this engagement operates not through Jewish themes but through Jewish form. Her deliberate choice of the Hebrew-derived neshome (soul) and guf (body) encodes a Jewish mystical sensibility at the level of the word itself. These finding challenges scholarship that views Vogel’s modernism as divorced from Jewish textual traditions, revealing instead how she used mystical vocabulary to create a distinctively Jewish avant-garde poetics.