A Poetics of Trauma: The Work of Dahlia Ravikovitch

Introduction: What Must Be Forgotten

xii ][ Introduction children’s books, and various translations of children’s classics and English poetry. Her rich literary corpus has won her a coveted place in the “Generation of the State,” the group of writers who came of age in the years following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. This group, which includes Yehuda Amichai, Nathan Zach, David Avidan, Yona Wallach, and Dahlia Hertz, transformed Hebrew poetry in the 1950s and 1960s. The Generation of the State, also known as the post-1948 Statehood Generation (Dor hamedinah), revolted against the modernism of Avraham Shlonsky, Nathan Alterman, and Leah Goldberg, questioning their ideology, structure, rhythm, and language. The works of Amichai, Zach, Avidan, Wallach , Ravikovitch and other poets of the Likrat literary group emerged as a new form of poetry that challenged the previous generation’s tendency toward a collective voice and a national heroic ethos. Instead, it embraced the personal and endowed it with universal valence. Although Ravikovitch was one of the leading poetic voices of this literary generation, she did not fully identify with the rebellion against her predecessors, but rather felt a tender affinity with the poetics and aesthetics of poets such as Alterman, Goldberg, and Yonatan Ratosh. Accordingly, her mode of poetry deviated in various ways from the stylistic norms of her generation,1 consequently leading to her establishment as a unique and inimitable voice in Hebrew literature. Like many of her contemporaries, Ravikovitch achieved canonical status in her own lifetime. She was awarded the Bialik Prize in 1987, the Israel Prize in 1998, and the Prime Minister’s Prize in 2005, the year of her death. This canonization has consolidated certain narrow assumptions about the direct connection between her personal history and her poetic persona. As is often the case with women writers, her work was read as representing her private , feminine—and hence limited—experience. Like Rachel Bluwstein Sela (1890–1931) and Yona Wallach (1944–1985), Ravikovitch had to endure a good deal of public scrutiny. Her biography became entwined not just with her writing but with her public persona. Even in the absence of a scholarly biography, Israeli readers are familiar with the main events of her life. She was born in Ramat Gan on November 27, 1936. Her mother, Michal Hominer (who would later adopt her second husband’s surname, Ben-Arie), was a much-loved teacher and the great-granddaughter of Rabbi Samuel Hominer (1845–1907), who was among the founders of the ultraorthodox Mea shearim, the fifth Jewish neighborhood to be built in Jerusalem outside the wall of the Old City in 1874. Her father, Levi Ravikovitch, was a Russian-born Jewish engineer and an amateur poet who immigrated to Palestine from China in Introduction ][ xiii the early 1930s. When Dahlia Ravikovitch was six years old, her father was killed in a car accident. She moved with her mother and twin brothers to Kibbutz Geva and, after years of misery, moved at age thirteen to different foster homes in Haifa. She studied linguistics and both Hebrew and English literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and English literature at Oxford University. She married twice (in 1957 and 1961) and in 1978 had a son, Ido Kalir, who from the age of eleven remained under the custody of his father Haim Kalir. Even though she suffered from clinical depression throughout her life, with the outbreak of the First Lebanon War in 1982 and the First Intifada in 1987, Ravikovitch became active in different Israeli peace movements , collaborating with Israeli and Palestinian artists and politicians, exposing injustice, and struggling for peace and human rights. Her much-gossiped-about private life did not detract from the widespread appreciation her work received from readers and fellow writers alike. Nevertheless , given her centrality to Israeli culture, there is an incongruously small amount of research on her work (only two books in Hebrew that are dedicated to the poetry,2 and no book at all in English). This book attempts to fill a critical gap by thoroughly examining the Ravikovitch oeuvre—both prose and poetry—as a whole. Although Ravikovitch discussed some of her life experiences in interviews, this volume focuses solely on her literary work, as Ravikovitch herself would probably have wanted. In one of her most provocative and controversial interviews, Ravikovitch was asked by Ayelet Negev: “If you were to write an autobiography, how would you title it? How would...