A Poetics of Trauma: The Work of Dahlia Ravikovitch

3 | "His Eldest Daughter": Women's Symbolic Orphanhood

Women’s Symbolic Orphanhood ][ 31 1940s and 1950s, and together with Shlonsky was considered the unchallenged dean of modern Hebrew poetry—a position that made him the main “target” of the next generation’s aesthetic revolution. In this sense, Wieseltier ’s suggestion to read the biographical father as Alterman can be seen as a recommendation to view Ravikovitch in the context of her generation’s rebellion against the aesthetic school of Alterman and Shlonsky.2 Tamar Hess focuses and genders Wieseltier’s claim and shows that Ravikovitch ’s poem refers specifically to Alterman’s poem “Boulevards in the Rain” (Sderot bageshem) from 1938: BoulevarDs in the rain The city is combed with light and rain. Profoundly pretty, she is forever shy. I will go out today, with my laughing daughter, Among all of those things that have been reborn. Here is the glass, her name is clearer than ours And who shall trespass on her icy reflection? On her threshold, as on the verge of our souls, Sound departs from light. Here is the iron, the idol and slave, The blacksmith of days who shoulders their weight. Here, my child, is our sister the stone, She who never weeps. In our time fire and water have risen. We pass through gates and through mirrors, It seems the night, too, is the river of both days, Upon whose coasts entire lands alight. It seems we, too, shall arrive by morning At the last house upon that spacious road Where the heavens are still standing alone Where a small boy throws a ball at their feet. The boulevard is combed with light and rain. Speak, oh green one, roar! Look, my lord, with my laughing daughter I am strolling down your main road. 32 ][ The State of Orphanhood My undone city fastens her dress. The smile of iron and stone still floats above. All of these do not forget the grace Of one single word of love.3 The connection between Ravikovitch and Alterman’s poems is noticeable both in their poetic settings—in Alterman’s, a father is walking with his daughter; in Ravikovitch’s, a daughter comes “to visit” her father—and in the inverted quotation of Alterman’s last two lines in Ravikovitch’s poem: “he cannot tell me one word of love.”4 The father in Alterman’s poem strolls with his daughter in a world that contains the possibility of change and development “among all of those things that have been reborn.” The daughter in Ravikovitch’s poem, on the other hand, is doomed to an endless psychological incarceration. Ravikovitch could thus be said to duplicate the position of the daughter who is unable to escape the patriarchal structure whereby a woman can be nothing more than an accompanist. At the same time, by internalizing the speaker’s doom, and by turning her poetic spotlight from father to daughter, Ravikovitch rebels against the place traditionally assigned to women (in the world, in genealogical relationships, in poetry). In Alterman’s poem the daughter’s voice is absent; in Ravikovitch’s poem the daughter is the speaker (Hess, “Poetica,” 39–40). The poem, however, does not simply give voice to the daughter; it insists on changing the power dynamic between father and daughter. Alterman’s poem displays a clear assumption about the father’s ownership of the daughter . In the Ravikovitch poem, where the speaker must mark the father in order to recognize him, this relationship is reconceived: “And that’s how I knew him, and I found ways to remember/that this very man was once my father.” Now it is not the father who defines the daughter (by being the person responsible for her birth), but the daughter who, as it were, invents the father as her necessary fantasy and in some way creates him. This inversion empowers the daughter and enables her to bluntly accuse the father at the end of the poem. Although the accusation does not allow her to escape her emotional imprisonment, it repositions her within her mental captivity. The laughing daughter in Alterman’s poem learns to express some of her misery and anger in Ravikovitch’s poem. Hess suggests “On the road at night” be read as a declaration of poetic independence from the poetic heritage of the previous generation in general and of Alterman in particular. To my mind, however, the poem asserts its Women’s Symbolic Orphanhood...