Rachel Bluvshtain was the most salient and recognizable symbol of Labour Zionism in the 20^th century and remains one of the most popular Hebrew poets in Israel into the 21^st century.

Bluvshtain was born to a Jewish family in Russia. As a young woman on her first visit to Palestine, she decided to join a Jewish settlement there, abandoning her plan to study art in Italy. Although her poems came to be associated with Labour Zionism and the Jewish pioneers in early 20^th century Palestine, her poetic career began only once she left her work collective due to illness, and ended about a decade later with her death at the age of 40.

Her short modernist lyric poetry betrays Russian acmeist and French imagist influence. Many of Bluvshtain’s poems capture and express a momentary thought, feeling, or memory. Their vocabulary and syntax are seemingly straightforward, they contain only a few images, and are concise. Bluvshtain’s style and her poems’ explicit celebration of simplicity allowed her to be read initially as a naïve contributor to ‘women’s poetry.’ A few scholarly works have since revised this critical assessment by showing the intertextual play, ambivalent language, and critique of contemporary poetic expectations embedded in her poems.