Dahlia Ravikovitch Research Articles

The Divine in Modern Hebrew Literature by Neta Stahl

Reviewed by: The Divine in Modern Hebrew Literature by Neta Stahl Chen Mandel-Edrei Neta Stahl. The Divine in Modern Hebrew Literature. London: Routledge, 2020. 212 pp. Neta Stahl's The Divine in Modern Hebrew Literature provides us with fresh terminology with which to consider modern Hebrew literary historiographies and constitutes a call for new scholarly frameworks within the field of modern Hebrew literature. Stahl argues that despite challenges to the established critical narrative of secularization in modern Hebrew letters, the binary categories of religion and secularization still dominate. Stahl claims that this binary system is ineffective for reading the various and complex forms by which divinity appears in modern texts and seeks to go beyond and against this limited framework. As was illuminated by Gershom Scholem, Hannan Hever, Shachar Pinsker, and others, the divine is embedded in the Hebrew language despite attempts to repress or secularize it, a condition that in the Zionist context might be culturally destructive. Acknowledging this, Stahl works to illuminate a broader spectrum [End Page 447] of representations of the divine while extending our understanding of their literary and cultural functions. Fundamental to this literature, Stahl writes, are three religious-philosophical tensions that challenge the act of representing divinity. The first is the biblical prohibition against representing God, which, developed by Maimonides, allows a merely rhetorical representation of a transcendent and bodyless entity whose intentions are concealed. The second is kabbalist perceptions according to which divinity resides in language itself, posing representational problems. The third is a historical tension that questions the assumption that modern Hebrew writers worked to depart from tradition. Here, Stahl adopts Shraga Bar-On's suggestion to understand modern literary projects through the concept of quest in which God is present and absent simultaneously. In the first chapter, which is dedicated to pantheism, Stahl reads canonic works from the turn of the twentieth century (by Aḥad Ha-ʿam, S. Y. Abramovitsh, Ḥ. N. Bialik, Shaul Tchernichovsky, and M. Y. Berdyczewski) and validates the well-established claim that these writers did not seek to secularize Judaism but to extract God from the limited halakhic world to a national sphere, which is natural and universal. The second chapter focuses on the relation between images of man and God as described by Y. H. Brenner and Avraham Shlonsky. Here, "theomorphism" and its nuances (mainly anthropomorphism) are the center of discussion. Stahl shows that in Brenner's writing, the world-without-God forces man to embrace godly powers for redeeming humanity, a move that fails and leaves man in what Aharon Appelfeld has called "distress of religiosity" (43). In Shlonsky's late poems, God provides utopian dimensions to the national labor of the pioneer, who then becomes "a divine creature whose own hands re-create God's world" (52). The third chapter is dedicated to Uri Ẓvi Greenberg and presents a complicated image of his transition from a world filled with "the God of mother-father" to a broken world (seemingly) devoid of God. Stahl shows how Greenberg's response to World War I was to split God into two entities; while rejecting the universal God of the arts that his contemporaries embraced, Greenberg elevates the local God whose divinity is realized through the open wound of the poet. Greenberg's response to World War II in Reḥovot ha-nahar (1951) is read by Stahl through the notion of hester panim and the dynamics of theodicy that help illuminate the poet's justification for violence. Focusing on S. Y. Agnon, the fourth chapter examines providence and punishment. Discussing various works, Stahl claims that Agnon depicts divine order through negative theology and criticizes it using what she calls "theo-narration" (103). The fifth chapter deals with Dahlia Ravikovitch and Yehuda Amichai's antiwar poetry. Stahl points out that in Amichai's poems, humans are presented as victims of violence that results from a distanced divinity; a structure that is incompatible with the secular world and that overlooks human accountability. She explains that this antitheodicy rhetoric allows Amichai to remain loyal to the victims by graphically depicting the results of violence without "tainting" them with politics. Juxtaposing Ravikovitch with Amichai, Stahl shows that Ravikovitch emphasizes what...

Political Readings of the Hagar Narratives in Poems By Jewish Women

Abstract: The biblical story of Hagar, Sarah’s Egyptian maidservant, whom she gave to her husband, Abraham, as a concubine, appears in the Book of Genesis, Chapters 16 and 20. This article discusses poems written by modern Jewish women poets that use the Hagar narrative to comment on the conflict between the Jews, the descendants of Sarah, and the Arabs, the descendants of Hagar. Two themes are prominent: The conflict between Sarah and Hagar, and their common motherhood. Through these themes, which are both manifest in the biblical story, the poets give expression to their own worldviews regarding the ethnic tensions between Jews and Arabs. Some of the poems discussed here conceive of the Hagar narrative as symbolizing the root of the unending conflict between Arabs and Jews. They are interested in rectifying the historical injustice that began, as it were, when Sarah banished her Egyptian maidservant Hagar to the wilderness with her son Ishmael. Other poems offer a gentler understanding of Hagar, seeking to understand and empathize with her through a common femininity/maternity and in this way to overcome the political implications of the story. These themes stand in contrast with the midrashic tradition that sees Ishmael as a symbol of the enemy and Hagar as the symbolic mother of the enemy. A third group of poems uses the Hagar story to reflect on the dynamic between Arabs and Jews, moving between violence and eroticism. This article will discuss poems by Dahlia Ravikovitch, Zerubavela Sasonkin, Nava Semel, Bracha Serri, Shirley Kaufman, Lynn Gottlieb, Lally Alexander, Hava Pinhas-Cohen and Rivka Miriam.

How to Live Different Deaths: Withdrawals from Abrahamic Kinship in Mahmoud Darwish and Dahlia Ravikovitch

Abstract This article examines the poems of two authors whose work emerges from within a contemporary scene of political paralysis, Palestine and Israel, in order to study what forms of agency they develop to shift representational systems of impasse and their embodiment in restrictive kinship orders. Though not generally put in conversation, both Mahmoud Darwish and Dahlia Ravikovitch make use of Abrahamic narratives, reimbuing reigning figures of matriarchy and patriarchy with the scene of death to disrupt competing accounts of national coherence. Exploring what new forms of life may develop from within a recurring encounter with death, both poets study the unknown avenues toward which figures of sacrifice and anti-generation may point. Following Judith Butler's call in Antigone's Claim to read Antigone's death as an index for an as-yet-unknown form of politics, I examine the ways in which Darwish and Ravikovitch's suicidal rewritings of Abrahamic ancestry unsettle intertwined notions of kinship and gender in order to gestures toward unacknowledged possibilities for ethics and coexistence. Studying Antigone's relation to death alongside the Abrahamic progenitors Ismāʿīl (Ishmael) and Rachel, the article details how Darwish and Ravikovitch shift their tradition's procreative logic away from the principle of self-preservation toward one of self-sacrifice, highlighting the promise of their implicit and explicit alliances across political, religious, and gendered boundaries.

Amos Oz: A humanist in the darkness

ABSTRACT The article examines Amos Oz’s political and social outlook through four topoi that constitute his books, articles and correspondence: The first concerns his dialectics with Israel’s Mediterranean character, from his affinity to Albert Camus to his treatment of Ashdod as a metaphor for Mediterraneanism; the second is the Zionist-crusader analogy in the literature and poetry of his contemporaries, and particularly A. B. Yehoshua and Dahlia Ravikovitch; the third topic is Oz’s oppositionality to the political actualization of messianism on the gamut from Ben-Gurion to “Gush Emunim”; and the fourth issue relates to Oz’s controversy with what I have branded as “Canaanite Messianism,” namely those who promote expansionism toward Greater Israel. Together, these combined perspectives unfold Oz’s humanist vision on the future of the State of Israel.

Between Complicity and Solidarity: Rape, Testimony, and Transnational Feminism in Dahlia Ravikovitch's "Hovering at a Low Altitude"

Between Complicity and Solidarity: Rape, Testimony, and Transnational Feminism in Dahlia Ravikovitch's "Hovering at a Low Altitude"

My Chana

My Chana Chana Kronfeld (bio) I became a fan of Chana Bloch's poetry some thirty-two years ago, after reading her first book, The Secrets of the Tribe. Chana sent my husband and me a copy of the book when I was pregnant with our daughter Maya and wrote, "Read the poem 'Eating Babies,' it will prepare you for the deliciousness to come." She was in Jerusalem with her family, working with Yehuda Amichai on translating his later poetry, while I was working with Stephen Mitchell in Berkeley as his native informant on Amichai's early poetry. I admired Chana's translations of Yiddish poetry and her early translations (with Ariel Bloch) of Dahlia Ravikovitch's poetry (The Window: New and Selected Poems).1 I knew her easy wit and deep learning would be a perfect match for Amichai's poetry. And indeed, this collaboration resulted in Bloch and Mitchell's celebrated The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, a volume that was to become the classic Amichai selection in English. Chana and I had been friends since my days as a graduate student in the late 1970s, but it wasn't until 1997 that we became sisters. It was then that Amichai entrusted the two of us with the manuscript of what would turn out to be his last book and magnum opus, Open Closed Open. That project developed into an addictive collaboration that lasted two decades. She was so open, funny, inventive, inviting, brilliant. We talked about every word and every emotion—in the poems and in our lives. We went on to translate together Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch. Over those twenty years, we shared great joy, smaḥot/simḥes—I even became marriage commissioner for a day so I could perform the wedding of Chana and Dave Sutter—and we shared sorrows, which life richly provided. They called us "the two Chanas," and we called each other "Sis." Naomi Seidman, with whom I collaborated on translating Dvora Baron, would joke with Chana that this made them translators-in-law. And since I call Dave "Bro," there were also the jokes about my brother and sister being married to each other. [End Page 8] During the last four and a half years of Chana's life, even while she was dealing with the indescribable challenges of cancer surgeries and the arduous treatments that followed, she completed—incredibly!—her magnificent fifth and sixth books, Swimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems (2015) and The Moon Is Almost Full, which Chana finished revising just a few weeks before her death; the book was published posthumously in September 2017. The last two books contain some of her best work ever. During those harrowing years, we also worked on another big translation project, for Robert Alter's comprehensive anthology The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (2015), which includes our expanded and restructured translation of Open Closed Open, as well as many previously untranslated early works—all in all, forty-six new poems—in addition to many of Chana's old translations from The Selected Poetry. I kind of got used to seeing her in one hospital bed or another, laptop propped up on pillows or mechanical pencil in hand, carefully revising a poem for the fifth time or figuring out a rhyme scheme for one of Amichai's challenging early sonnets. It was always exhilarating to work with Chana, but it was nothing short of awe-inspiring to observe her ability, even in the throes of terminal illness, to find joy in creating verbal art. Now as I deal with this terrible loss, I feel supported by everything she modeled for me. Chana would joke about the burden of always needing to be a good little student at everything she did; in the last few months, in tormenting hours of pain and despair, I'd tell her again and again that she didn't have to be such a good student of dying too, that she didn't need to be so brave all the time—but she was. And she was indeed the best of teachers too. She taught me honesty, dedication, attentiveness...

The Roads Taken

The Roads Taken Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi (bio) Standing in the wood-paneled library at the Yaddo Writers and Artists Retreat on a rainy day in the fall of 1989, I idly browsed the eclectic collection of books that had been placed there by former residents of this haven where solitude, natural beauty, and creature comforts have coaxed the best out of generations of artists. Suddenly, my eye caught a name: Chana Bloch. (The book was, as I recall, The Window, translations with Ariel Bloch of Dahlia Ravikovitch's poems.) I picked it up and started reading, now in earnest. I knew Ravikovitch's poetry, or at least I thought I did, until I met it in its English cloak and saw things I had never seen before in the original Hebrew. It was comforting to find a Jewish/Israeli voice among the American cadences in that library—especially as I was working at the time on an essay on the poetry of Dan Pagis and could find no echo, in that majestic retreat, of his German-accented and Holocaust-inflected Hebrew lines. But all the while, the name of the translator and the timbre of her voice were testing my brain and a synapsis struggled to form: was the young woman named Chana Faerstein, whom I had known years before in Jerusalem, now Chana Bloch the translator? With some effort, I unearthed her address (no email then) and wrote to Chana Bloch asking if she was, in her earlier incarnation, Chana Faerstein. And that is how Chana came back into my life on a gloomy autumn afternoon in Saratoga Springs, New York. From that day to this, with years and continents between us, she has never been far from my consciousness, though now it is death itself that separates us … We had started together at Leib and Esther Rochman's Jerusalem tisch in the mid-1960s, we women with English on our tongues, Yiddish in our DNA, and Hebrew in our hearts. We were surrounded in the Rochman home by the ghoulish graffiti of their daughter, Rivka Miriam, who would go on to become an accomplished poet but whose adolescent charcoal murals of emaciated figures from Over There belied the [End Page 21] energy, the humor, the melodies, and the stories that kept us coming back to Rochman's table. And then, Life happened, to us both. By the time we reconnected, we were each somewhat bruised but also much wiser—and funnier. We met over the years in our respective homes in Berkeley and Jerusalem; at a Jewish writers' conference in San Francisco; at a colloquium on the poetry of Yehuda Amichai in Durham, North Carolina. But most of our encounters were on the page, as I pored over Chana's translations of Ravikovitch and Yehuda Amichai, which she did with her namesake and soul sister Chana Kronfeld, and of the Song of Songs with her first husband, Ariel. Then, as Chana's own poetry began to accumulate, I came to realize that at nearly every turn in my own life, she had been there just before me and had managed to craft those intersections into magnificent verse: in divorce, in "late love" and remarriage, in the efforts to create something new and beautiful out of the fragments of our parents' (and then our own) broken and reconstituted lives, in our desire to transmit our secrets and struggles to our children in ways that would enable and not cripple them: I wanted to save the two of youfrom the misery that filled our house.Even smoke-blind,I saw your serious faces asking.It was you who saved me. Would it help youto know the scope of my confusions?The journals are full of secretsbut maybe you know them without my telling. The key to the safe is under the sugar bowl.1 That sugar bowl stands in all our kitchens … And then came the cancer. Helplessly, we witnessed Chana's dogged determination not to let the beast devour her spirit as it took chunks out [End Page 22] of her body. It was not in the clichéd "battle" against the Grim Reaper—as if...

A Poet-Translator Writes a Reader's Report: What Chana Bloch Taught Me

A Poet-Translator Writes a Reader's Report:What Chana Bloch Taught Me Kathryn Hellerstein (bio) I first encountered Chana Bloch in the late 1970s. My teacher, the Yiddish poet Malka Heifetz Tussman, mentioned Chana to me at her Henry Street dining room table one Friday afternoon when I had come up from Stanford for my weekly session on Yiddish poetry with her. "Do you know her? A little older than you, with blond curly hair? At the poetry reading last week, she read a poem by Yankev Glatshteyn." I'm inventing what Malka said that afternoon. I may have written it down in my notes, which are probably still somewhere in the drawers of my attic office in Philadelphia. While I may not remember her exact words, I do remember Malka's tone—at once appreciative, ironic, and curious. I must have also known about Chana from my dissertation advisor, the translator, scholar, and poet John Felstiner, who knew Chana from the Bay Area poetry scene and who very much admired A Dress of Fire, Chana's translations of Dahlia Ravikovitch. I recall that John invited Chana down to Stanford to read from her translations and poems, and I think that I met her then. Right around that time, too, I read Chana's translations, published under her maiden name, Faerstein, of three Holocaust poems by Glatshteyn ("Come Now, Let's," "Wagons," and "Smoke") and of sixteen stanzas from "Spiritual Soil" by Avrom Sutzkever, in Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg's A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry,1 a collection that was central to my own beginnings as a translator and scholar of Yiddish poetry. Yiddish was important to Chana as a starting place for her poetry, and translation became central to her work as a poet. In a much later interview with Dianne Bilyak for the Poetry Society of America, Chana explained that, from the beginning, Yiddish, translation, and poetry were interwoven for her: [End Page 33] I was drawn to translation because I am a poet. As a young writer, in a workshop with Robert Lowell, I submitted, along with my own poems, some translations of the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever. Lowell told me, "You can learn to write from your own translations." His suggestion proved to be the most helpful advice I ever received about writing. A translator needs to know at least one language very well: her own. You might say that translation is a form of apprenticeship—not to a master craftsman, but to the genius of the language itself. When you translate you are constantly choosing among alternatives in order to convey meaning, register, image, mood, music; each time you choose, you are strengthening muscles that you need in shaping your own work. It's a strenuous but efficient way of teaching yourself to write.2 In that same interview, Chana went on to explain that, in addition to teaching her the craft of writing poetry, translating poems also gave her the means by which to acknowledge and perpetuate "the creativity" of Jewish languages and culture, in both Yiddish, which she had learned as a child, and Hebrew, which she studied in college and graduate school. Translation was, she said, "a way … more meaningful by far than the 'nostalgia yiddishkayt' that often passes for 'Jewish identity.' Once I was involved in this work, I felt a responsibility to help save what might otherwise be lost, and to contribute something of substance to American-Jewish culture. … I would not have written as I do without the example of the Yiddish and Hebrew writers. They confirmed my belief that the questions are always larger than the answers."3 If only I'd had the chance to hear Chana's reflections on Jewish languages and translation in the early 1980s, I would have recognized in her a kindred poet and translator walking ahead of me on the pathway toward translating Yiddish poetry in America. At that time, I was teaching in the Boston area, where Lowell cast a long, posthumous shadow and where Lowell's admirers did not acknowledge Yiddish poetry as generously as Lowell had in his response to the young Chana's translations. Soon after...

The “Intended Misidentification” of the Other in the Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch

This article explores the attitude of Israeli poet Dahlia Ravikovitch (1936–2005) to the Other by considering, side-by-side, one of her poems, "The Viking," and a little known episode in her life, which though brief was, as it turns out, quite important for Ravikovitch: her voluntary work, in 1964, at the Chicago-based residential school for autistic children run by the famous psychologist, Bruno Bettelheim.

Voice of responsibility: Dahlia Ravikovitch's ‘Egla ‘Arufa (Felled Heifer)

In a cycle of poems, Sugeyot beyahadut bat zemanenu, “Issues in Contemporary Judaism,” Dahlia Ravikovitch protests against human suffering and fatalities that occur during war and conflicts of attrition involving Israel's indigenous peoples and contiguous populations. Among the poetry, ‘Egla ‘arufa, with its cryptic title and densely encoded contents, requires textual “demystification” for its central message to be heard. First, this article identifies the most crucial pair of Hebrew sources underlying this poem and discusses their intertextual influence and the transition between them for an enriched reading. Second, through textual analysis this study applies a postmodern literary poetic – a “hermeneutic lag” – to a unique dynamic in the dimensions of the writing. In general, I relate to selected poems by Dahlia Ravikovitch as self-portraits, and regard “Felled Heifer” as an abstract figuration of the voice of the speaker: the voice of responsibility.

A Lamenter in Leopard-print Pants

Zeruya Shalev is a lamentational author. Like Dahlia Ravikovitch, the great poet who influenced her, she adopted the model of classical biblical lamentation and redesigned it in accordance with her worldview. But unlike Dahlia Ravikovitch, the modernist who laments in her poetry for youth that has been lost and will never return, Shalev laments, in a post-modern style, a youth that apparently never was, and is experienced in the form of a pastiche. The difference between the two is expressed in the position of the speaker or narrator. Ravikovitch maintains the structure of the biblical lament in which there is an “I” who complains before a “you” about the difficult situation of the “he,” which is made of fragments of the victim-like “I.” In Shalev’s work, on the other hand, an “epidemic of multiplicity” is apparent in the “you” as well as in the “he” and attests to a different perception of the concept of identity. The assumption of the existence of a priori subjectivity is replaced by a perception of the “I” that is a self-performance of a masked ball of personas who express an imaginary “I” only.

“Our Virgin Friends and Wives”?: Female Sexual Subjectivity in Yona Wallach’s Poetry

Yona Wallach introduced to Hebrew poetry an innovative discourse on gender and sexuality. The article claims that one of the issues that preoccupied Wallach throughout her poetic career was that of female sexual subjectivity, of the ways in which a woman can occupy the position of a sexual subject. From the outset, her approach to this question was radically different from that of her predecessors in Hebrew poetry, and the answers she devised changed with the evolution of her poetics, leading her eventually to a performative understanding of gender that anticipated formulations generated by feminist and queer thought in the 1990s. Beginning with a comparison of Wallach’s “Cornelia” to Dahlia Ravikovitch’s “Mechanical Doll” that highlights the refusal of the former to identify with the traditional feminine position of objectification and victimization, the paper proceeds to show her appropriation of a male voice in order to produce sexual discourse. In her later poetry Wallach develops an understanding of gender as non-dichotomous, performative, and fluid, one that enables her to produce sexual discourse in the first person feminine. This understanding receives overt expression in her didactic poems, but it is also enacted performatively in the sexual fantasy poems of the book Wild Light .

A Poetics of Trauma: The Work of Dahlia Ravikovitch by Ilana Szobel (review)

Reviewed by: A Poetics of Trauma: The Work of Dahlia Ravikovitch by Ilana Szobel Adriana X. Jacobs A POETICS OF TRAUMA: THE WORK OF DAHLIA RAVIKOVITCH. By Ilana Szobel. HBI Series on Jewish Women. Pp. xx + 177. Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2013. Paper, $35.00. As I prepare this review, Operation Protective Edge is underway in the Gaza Strip and news and social media outlets circulate daily competing narratives of grief and culpability. Questions of perspective shape each tweet, Facebook status, and news report that passes across my computer screen. Where does one stand—geographically, politically, culturally—in relation to this conflict? Who has the authority/responsibility/objectivity to report/represent/translate it? Questions like these preoccupied the Israeli poet Dahlia Ravikovitch (1936–2005) for decades, beginning with her landmark collection The Love of the Orange (1959), which included the heartbreaking poem, “A Man Stands on the Road.” When the poet was six, her father was run over by a drunk driver; Ravikovitch was told that he had gone abroad for [End Page 476] treatment. A few years later, her playmates informed her that he had died in that accident. The father would never return, instead he remains a spectral figure in this poem, standing in the middle of the road, in limbo, occupying an intermediary and precarious position that would become a critical and political vantage point in Ravikovitch’s later work. It is a vantage point that she would encourage her readers to risk. Ilana Szobel’s A Poetics of Trauma: The Work of Dahlia Ravikovitch, is the first comprehensive scholarly study of the poet in English. The word “trauma” gestures to the theoretical framework that Szobel applies to Ravikovitch’s work, but the key word in this study is “poetics,” the way that a poet harnesses the mechanics of a poem—its form, tropes, and language—to fashion what Szobel refers to as the “traumatic personality” that develops in Ravikovitch’s oeuvre. In her introduction, Szobel poses two crucial questions: “How can a situation without choice be part of a process of self-construction? How can a state of emotional imprisonment function not as a limitation that covers up a repressed subjectivity, but rather as the subjectivity itself?” (p. xvii). The question of genre—why a poem?—emerges from these considerations. How does a sonnet, for example, articulate and represent conflict, trauma, and crisis in ways that are absent or otherwise distinct from a news report or doctor’s diagnosis? Rather than assume obvious answers to these questions, Szobel’s reading examines the “specific poetic language and structure” that Ravikovitch developed over five decades in her poetic representation of private and political conflicts and their protagonists (p. 5). Szobel’s study divides into four parts. The first introduces Ravikovitch’s work through the theme and tropes of orphanhood that run through it. Szobel contends that orphanhood, often read as an autobiographical status, is also a symbolic position, “representing femininity in its social, cultural, and emotional formation” (p. 30). Szobel’s reading proves to be groundbreaking: it balances Ravikovitch’s biographical orphanhood with an astute theoretical reading that understands orphanhood as a state in tension with inherited religious, cultural, and national narratives and affiliations, even with the “symbolic order” of the poem itself. In the second section, “Estrangement: The Project of Female Subjectivity,” Szobel persuasively argues that the estrangement (harigut) of Ravikovitch’s poetic speakers and fictional characters is an “enterprise of self-production,” a way to position and develop a self-identity that is subjective, authentic, and independent of societal expectations and patriarchal law (p. 39). This chapter offers a close reading of select stories from Ravikovitch’s collection Winnie Mandela’s Soccer Club (1997). The title is a reference to the notorious Mandela United Football Club, which was responsible for acts of vigilante violence in the 1980s of South Africa. While Szobel does not discuss here the relation between the historical Winnie [End Page 477] Mandela, who founded the club, and Ravikovitch’s protagonists, it is a strand that deserves further study. In part 3, on mania, depression, and madness, Szobel argues that a fundamental component of the manic-depressive temperament is the “inability to not...

“Be Thou Like a Young Hart, O Beloved Mine”: Dahlia Ravikovitch’s Song of Songs

“Be Thou Like a Young Hart, O Beloved Mine”: Dahlia Ravikovitch’s Song of Songs Ilana Pardes (bio) Desiring the exhilarations of changes: The motive for metaphor, shrinking from The weight of primary noon, The A B C of being. —Wallace Stevens, “A Motive for Metaphor” Chana was the first to introduce me into the exhilarating world of metaphors, my guide to the “motive for metaphor” and the “A, B, C” of literary life. I had the great pleasure of being her student in a seminar she gave at Berkeley in 1980 (I was an undergraduate at the time) which revolved around the intricacies of metaphoric configurations in theoretical texts as well as in the poetry of Yehuda Amichai. It was an exceptionally uplifting intellectual experience. Chana has the rare capacity to combine rigorous theoretical thought with superb close readings, both in her teaching and in her writing. We were a small group of four fervent students and we savored, among other things, the article Chana had just written, “Novel and Conventional Metaphors: A Matter of Methodology,” which ends with the lines from Wallace Stevens, quoted in my epigraph.1 But it was not only the intellectual discoveries that made this first encounter so memorable. At that early stage of her career as a teacher, Chana was already a full-fledged, charismatic mentor. And mentoring for Chana meant (and still means) a personal bond, a very precious friendship that goes beyond the formal framework of class or office hours. Our friendship has thrived ever since then between Berkeley and Jerusalem. And as in the best of friendships, familial dinners, musical get-togethers, intimate chats, and work have intermingled freely. I have an ongoing dialogue with Chana in diverse realms. When I strive, as a teacher, to turn seminars into workshops and a joint learning experience, I think of her; when I read my students’ work and try to guide them, I recall her exceptionally detailed and attentive comments on the margins of my dissertation (no student of Chana will ever forget her margins.) In my current project on the Song of Songs and its peculiar history of reception in different cultural contexts, I’ve found myself thinking of Chana’s remarkable work on a whole array of topics—from metaphor and allusion to the poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch. [End Page 201] During one of Chana’s visits to Jerusalem two years ago, on a hot summer morning (Chana, unlike me, actually loves hamsinim), I asked her whether she’d be willing to have a hevruta with me on Ravikovitch’s poem, “Intoxication,” one of the most fascinating modern adaptations of the Song of Songs. With characteristic generosity and enthusiasm, Chana joined me. We met, as always, in a café and spent the morning with this one beautiful poem. That very special summer morning was the inspiring point of departure for the reading that follows. “Intoxication” forms part of Dahlia Ravikovitch’s first book, The Love of an Orange (Ahavat tapuah ha-zahav), published in 1959. I quote in full the superb translation by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld in Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch. Intoxication If only I had the red dress that eludes me still, That dress of great price, And if only I had a young hart leaping upon the hills, Bounding upon the heights— From the rooftops we would swing And the wings of the winds we’d bind Until they were entangled Like a braid of twine. The winds would puff their cheeks and take flight Till the sun went forth like a strongman, Swaggering in his might. From his table he’d throw me crumbs That would blaze upon the red dress, And lowing, assail me again, Goring me with horned rays Like oxen twain. And the leaves of the bushes would murmur and chime Like showering coins of gold, And he’d gaze at me in love, he’d gaze enthralled, And I’d call: Be thou like a young hart, O beloved mine.2 In the introduction to Hovering at a Low Altitude, Bloch and Kronfeld claim that “Ravikovitch is cherished for her love poems” though her...

Hear O Lord: Poems From the Disturbances of 2000-2009 (review)

Reviewed by: Hear O Lord: Poems From the Disturbances of 2000-2009 Phillip Hollander Hear O Lord: Poems From the Disturbances of 2000-2009, by Eliaz Cohen, translated by Larry Barak. New Milford: Toby Press, 2010. 177pp. $14.95. Bringing together poems from two of the poet's previously published Hebrew collections, this bilingual volume reveals a poet at a career crossroads. Unlike prominent Israeli poets Uri Tzvi Greenberg and Avot Yeshurun, who successfully advanced their ideological views through poetry without sacrificing their aesthetic strengths, Eliaz Cohen's promotion of his political views through poetry has distanced him from the understated tone and layered meaning featured in his best poetry. As a result, he needs to choose between continued poetic development and use of poetry for political ends. With rare exception, Cohen's political poems prove to be unconvincing kitsch of potential interest only to those sharing similar views. Raised in the West Bank settlement of Elkana and currently residing over the Green line in Kibbutz Kfar Etzion, Cohen adheres to a National Religious ideology that views settlement of the whole of the historic Land of Israel as the pathway to redemption. Adherents of this ideology actively fought representatives of the democratically elected Israeli government during Israel's unilateral disengagement from Gaza in 2005, and, in a section of the present volume entitled "An Invitation to Cry: Six Poems on the Disengagement," Cohen passionately sides with these protesters and employs his poetry to convey their political sentiments. Yet, in these and other political poems in the collection, Cohen all too often selects ready-made metaphors rather than creating original ones to convey his emotions and experience and thereby dampens or deadens the impact of his poetry on non-partisan readers. For example, in a poem intended to express his anxiety about Israel's Jewish future entitled "From Poems of the Coming Holocaust," Cohen compares Israeli Jewry's future fate to that of the Holocaust's Jewish victims. He prophecies that if nothing is done the land's Jewish inhabitants will become "azure/ crystalline/ ethereal," like Auschwitz's incinerated Jews, whose essence melted away in the heavens together with crematorium smoke. Beyond its lack of heuristic value, this self-pitying comparison proves off-putting and tasteless due to its divorce from actual conditions in Israel/Palestine. Similarly Cohen repeatedly draws on the biblical story of the binding of Isaac for countless images intended to portray the lives of Israeli Jews as a ceaseless and frequently deadly religious trial. Binding and ram imagery pervade his poetry, and one must ask if this theme can be conveyed in a more original manner. In contrast, when Cohen employs the minor tone dominant in contemporary Israeli poetry, he writes subtle and nuanced poems. Cohen's poetry on [End Page 148] universal themes, such as parenthood, mourning, and love, displays a unique poetic voice drawing upon, but not imitating, the poetry of Dan Pagis, Dahlia Ravikovitch, Hayyim Guri, and Yona Wallach, whose work Cohen frequently alludes to. One can only hope that he continues to develop this part of his corpus, which is on full display in poems like "Ultrasound" and "From Me To My Uncle." The short poem "Ultrasound " constitutes a captivating meditation on the wonder of parenthood and exemplifies Cohen's poetry at its best: "'And all the people saw the sounds'/ look, we do too: a tiny heart dancing in red and blue/ the spine a pearl necklace/ (or sun rays)/ five fingers searching/ and five more/ the sex organ is hidden/ (in any case we didn't want to know)/ something is trembling inside us/ wanting but unable to touch" (p. 45). In quotation marks, the opening line comes from the description of the giving of the law at Sinai in Exodus 20:14. The visual perception of sound referred to in this verse has long been understood as a cross-sensory metaphor intended to convey the wondrousness nature of divine revelation, something deemed absent from modern life. Yet the poem's title and its reference to obstetric sonography employing ultrasound waves to produce visual images hint that such wonder does not lie completely beyond human grasp. Modern Jews can visually perceive...

She's Got the Power

The blazon is a poetic form characterized by a lyric catalogue of the admirable physical features of the poet’s beloved. Reading this catalogue as a form of dismemberment, Nancy Vickers and Patricia Parker argue that the blazon exists as a tool for controlling and objectifying the beloved. Under Vickers’ argument, the male poet’s act of dismembering the female beloved protects him from the transformative dismemberment that Actaeon suffered at Diana’s hands (Vickers, “Diana” 273). Meanwhile, Parker explores how the blazon is utilized as a tool for figurative rape, assault, and commodification (Parker 132). Both argue that the blazon features an oppressive power dynamic in which a controlling male-dominant order (defined by its embodiment in the male poet-as-Actaeon) dismembers the female beloved-as-Diana’s physical body, making her into a voiceless, powerless object. And yet, this oppressive power dynamic does not escape subversive forces, as demonstrated by Dahlia Ravikovitch’s “Clockwork Doll.” 2 Ravikovitch’s poem subverts the blazon’s oppressive power dynamic through a three-step process: resistance via movement, partial physical liberation, and empowerment through transformation. Ravikovitch’s doll actively resists the blazon’s oppressive power dynamic by literally moving. Because this movement defies the power dynamic’s rigid constraints, it brings about partial liberation from that power dynamic. This partial liberation, in turn, allows Ravikovitch’s doll to empower herself by co-opting dismemberment and its transformative power, removing her from the blazon’s power dynamic. Because the poet catalogues the doll’s physical features, “Clockwork Doll” demonstrates that it is a blazon. In identifying Petrarch’s adaptation of Ovidian myth as the model for future blazons, Vickers indicates that the poet-as-Actaeon “cannot allow [the beloved-as-Diana] to dismember his body; instead he repeatedly, although reverently, scatters hers throughout his scattered rhymes” (“Diana” 279), a process Parker relates to the act of taking inventory (131). In “Clockwork Doll,” the poet takes inventory of the doll’s physical features: “And my hair was golden, my eyes were blue, / and my dress was the color of flowers and all, / and a sprig of cherries was tacked to my hat” (Ravikovitch lines 12-14). Though not particularly complex, this analysis places “Clockwork Doll” firmly within the tradition of the blazon, a tradition it will subsequently subvert.

Craving Pure Essence: Portret ["Portrait"] by Dahlia Ravikovitch

My research examines the contemporary Hebrew poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch as the prismatic self-portraiture of a lovelorn soul. Across the oeuvre , the poet-persona laments her lifelong experience of love in emotionally dissatisfying proportions. The imbalance affects her personal life and stalls her creative activity. She suffers existential malaise only held at bay when she is saturated with eros or immersed in poetic composition. Textual analysis shows that there are parallel aspects of the persona's experience of each, suggesting their equivalence in potential to assuage her discomfort: a sensation of descent, sinking fully cushioned into organic matter, and a heightening of sensory perception. When the natural resources of eros and creative vitality are scarce, the persona yearns for the succor of a substance of sustenance that she calls "vanilla." Such is the case in Portret ["Portrait"], arguably the centerpiece of the persona's gallery. In an extraordinary performance of bios , the speaker of "Portrait" reveals that she is an accomplished writer of royal stature. Unfortunately, her work is at a standstill: this skilled lyricist is languishing in a vast vacuum of creative torpor. The research methodology draws on textual analysis of three types: extended intertextual reverberation, "intratextual" equation, and literary analysis through the lens of écriture féminine .

Hovering at Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch (review)

Reviewed by: Hovering at Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch Rachel S. Harris Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld , trans. Hovering at Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009. Pp. 271. Cloth $18.95. ISBN 978-0-393-06524-4. Award-winning Israeli poet Dahlia Ravikovitch (1936-2005) was a paradox in life and in her art. Reclusive and private, she was also the source of media sensationalism in Israel, often featuring in gossip columns for her wardrobe, politics, and personal life. Her poetry employed biblical language in a modern Hebrew vernacular and brought together aspects of her personal biography and her strong political consciousness. "Her status as a beloved, unofficial poet laureate allowed her protest to carry some weight with the Israeli public." (17) Well-known in translation for her vocal opposition to the Israeli war in Lebanon from 1978 onwards with poems like "You Can't Kill a Baby Twice," in Israel her fame began earlier with the publication of her first volume of poetry "The Love of an Orange." (1959) She is associated with the State Generation of poets, which includes renowned figures such as Yehuda Amichai, Natan Zach and Haim Gouri, though she is often paralleled with her contemporary Yona Wallach, another leading female poet of the 1960s and 1970s. With this volume, Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld showcase a broad selection of Ravikovitch's oeuvre and provide the most comprehensive collection in English translation to date. In this impressive book they provide a helpful introduction to Ravikovitch's work, which places the poet in the context of her peers and the history of Israeli society to which her verse often responds. Best known as a poet, Ravikovitch also wrote short stories and children's poetry. In addition she translated English poetry and numerous children's literary classics. According to Bloch and Kronfeld, Ravikovitch's "defining subject" in her own poetry is "the devastating consequences of unequal power relations for the individual and for society, the self in a state of crisis refracting the state of the nation." (19) The editors explain the reach and variety of her poetry, her style: "restrained pathos to prickly ambivalence, ebullient playfulness, and self-deprecating humor;" the devices that mark the virtuosity of her talent: "irony" and her ability to "hold pathos in check;" and her failure to "shy away from the astringent or irreverent." (21) While the introduction is certainly indispensable, it is somewhat bother some that the authors chose to refer to the poet by her first name Dahlia, rather [End Page 91] than the more traditional approach of referring to an author by his or her surname. Though dissonant, this artifice seems an attempt to link Ravikovitch with other key figures in Jewish history (both secular and religious) such as the biblical matriarchs, or author and poetess Rahel Bluwestein, who is also known only by her first name. The collection is organized by date, and subdivided by publication. This helpful order gives us a flavor of the thematic cohesion of independent volumes and provides a feel for the development of Ravikovitch's subject matter and style over the course of her life and career. Through her invocation of exotic locales such as Zanzibar, Australia, Byzantium, and the world of the Thousand and One Nights, Ravikovitch's poetry has a fairy-tale quality. Rather than foreground Jewish themes, she invokes the Bible as a mythical landscape. Similarly, she calls on images from Greek legend and crusader narratives. Modernist in its construction, the poetry ranges thematically through more ethereal themes conjuring a romantic and indeterminate world. The poetry's energy often comes from the power of nature: the sun, the sea, ants, wasps, and other creatures occupy her verse. There is a constant sense of the desire to escape, longing for adventure and for the world beyond the horizon. In "The Blue West," she writes: I want to reach the ends of thoughtWhose very beginningsSlash like a knife.I want to ascend to the fringes of the sunAnd not fall prey to the fire. "Love," Ravikovitch's poem of romantic passion, brings together this desire...

Forever Beholden: Orphanhood in the Work of Dahlia Ravikovitch

The traumatic event of her father's death is a fundamental experience in Dahlia Ravikovitch's writing. This loss and the simultaneity of the death's presence and its concealment create an emotional mechanism of psychological imprisonment in the orphan's world. This study explores the effect of this emotional break on Ravikovitch's oeuvre and singles out a sort of poetics of orphanhood. Using various psychoanalytic theories, it examines the connection between Ravikovitch's poetic preferences and the particular nature of her traumatic event.

Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch

Dahlia Ravikovitch, who died in 2005, was one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Hebrew literature and the Israeli peace movement. In these poems about fathers and daughters, men and women, kings and their subjects, she articulates the painful asymmetries of power. The extraordinary stylistic range of her poetry reveals her mastery of the verbal art.