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.