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

In a memorable comparison of the Modern Hebrew literary establishment to an Orthodox synagogue, Amalia Kahana-Carmon discusses the ways in which Hebrew women writers have been relegated to the “women’s side” of a cultural and intellectual partition (meḥitzah).¹ A recent spate of critical attention to the poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch (1936–2005) begs the question of whether it is possible, or even desirable, to read Hebrew poetry outside of a gendered context.² Must renewed attention to Ravikovitch’s poetic corpus and literary legacy be contextualized in light of her being a Hebrew woman poet, and not just a Hebrew poet? The question of when it is important to give up gendered discourse in favor of other stylistic or cultural considerations, and when it is necessary to maintain gender on the critical radar, can be felt palpably in Ilana Szobel’s A Poetics of Trauma: The Work of Dahlia Ravikovitch.

Szobel, Assistant Professor of Hebrew Literature at Brandeis University, limns a portrait of Ravikovitch’s career that illuminates the problems of gendered readings, while acknowledging the legitimacy of such readings when performed with skill and sensitivity. In her psychoanalytic analysis, Szobel zeroes in on the personal traumas that contributed to the development of Ravikovitch’s unique poetic voice: the early loss of her father; her sense of homelessness as a young child unable to settle into the collective lifestyle in Kibbutz Geva, where her bereaved mother moved with her three young children; the failure of several marriages; and the loss of custody of her child. Szobel attempts to link a “poetics of trauma,” arrived at via psychoanalytic readings, to Ravikovich’s renowned political activism and engaged poetry. Ravikovitch’s political outspokenness is said by Yitzhak Laor to have begun as early as the 1960s. It became fully realized after Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, reaching a crescendo with Ravikovitch’s staunch support, throughout the last decade of her life, of Palestinian rights.³

According to Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld, “power and powerlessness is Ravikovitch’s defining subject.”⁴ Szobel’s monograph beautifully articulates Ravikovitch’s engagement with that subject, on the level of the individual psyche as well as in the political domain. Organized around the major stations in Ravikovitch’s personal and poetic consciousness—“The State of Orphanhood,” “The Project of Female Subjectivity,” “Mania, Depression, and Madness,” and finally “Testimony, Complicity, and National Identity”—it explores personal and political motifs throughout Ravikovitch’s poetry as parts of a single biographical and poetic continuum. As Szobel says in her introductory remarks: “Although each of Ravikovitch’s poems and stories is open to independent reading, my interpretation focuses on the connections among the texts. Such a reading integrates Ravikovitch’s writing into a fragmented novel of sorts, at the center of which is a female protagonist who is portrayed at diverse phases in her life” (p. xvii).

It may sound as though Szobel’s intention is to read Ravikovitch’s poetry wholly biographically, but in fact Szobel’s negotiation of the personal and the political in Ravikovitch’s work is far more sophisticated. She articulates the necessity for a gendered reading, insofar as reading the struggle of a poetic self, a gendered self and a traumatized self in the poetry sheds light on the kinds of political, public and literary discussions implicit in Ravikovitch’s poetic oeuvre.

Szobel’s most significant insight into Ravikovitch’s work is construed from a careful reading of it alongside the work of Yona Wallach (1944–1985), the other major female poet of the “Statehood” generation in Israeli literature (the group of writers who established themselves in the first decades after the birth of the state in 1948). The premise for Szobel’s comparative reading is that each of these woman writers engages in “subverting” the symbolic order presented by Hebrew poetry and Israeli society. While Wallach, according to Szobel, challenges the symbolic order through a poetics of fractured language, Ravikovitch...