Queer Expectations by Zohar Weiman-Kelman

Author:Zohar Weiman-Kelman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2018-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

September 13th, 1864

Dated September 13, 1864, the poem was printed in a private edition of Lazarus’s poems and translations meant for friends and family. This same edition was reprinted a year later for wider circulation.38 “Only a Dream” did not appear in any of the versions of Lazarus’s republished works, but luckily the Center for Jewish History in New York has preserved multiple copies of the private 1866 edition. The poem itself opens the question of survival; if a dream exists “only” “while erst it did last,” the poem exists not only beyond the time of the dream but also beyond the time of the poet, charging the illuminating power of its vision over the past with an air of prophesy, making the future present. This is another example of the working of queer history’s undoing of linear time’s division of past and present. At the same time, the traces described in the poem, and the traces of the poem itself, allow us access to a history of queer desire, an intersection we see again in Lazarus’s poetry when she returns to the dream, or rather, the dream returns to her, in a beautiful sonnet included in her 1886 manuscript:39

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