A Poetics of Trauma: The Work of Dahlia Ravikovitch

2 | "She Has Damaged the Little Girl": Orphanhood and Motherhood

22 ][ The State of Orphanhood Dysfunctional Motherhood, de facto Orphanhood The story “Tirtza in the Snow” is about Tirtza and her three children during a storm (a storm probably imagined by Tirtza). Tirtza is depicted throughout the story as dysfunctional, unable to make the transition from the status of a child to that of a mother. As a result, Tirtza effectively raises her three children as orphans; all of them display the weakness that is characteristic of orpanhood in the Ravikovitch oeuvre. This is made painfully clear in the scene in which Tirtza denies her daughter: “Tirtza quickly opened the kitchen door and picked up the little girl from the floor. . . . Tirtza wanted to hit her and then she burst out laughing. ‘Nice to meet you,’ she thought and maliciously smiled with her eyes. ‘What a pleasure that this child is not mine’” (Winnie Mandela’s, 178). In what appears to be a motherly gesture, Tirtza picks up her daughter. Even this, however, is performed without any feeling for her parental responsibility . The physical and emotional violence expressed in the way Tirtza touches her daughter drains the action of any recognizably parental quality. What might have been a sign, however minor, of Tirtza’s commitment to her role as a mother becomes one more act of emotional abandonment. Tirtza insists on preserving her pre-motherhood identity, refusing to adjust to her new role. Despite her daughter’s intense desire for attention, for example, Tirtza neglects her and instead writes a letter to her own parents: “The little one [Tirtza’s daughter] stood at the doorway and kicked with her feet on the door. She beat, and beat, beat and beat. Her eyes and nose were red from crying, and Tirtza locked the kitchen’s doors so she could quietly write a letter to her parents” (177). Tirtza tries to create for herself a closed sphere (the room, the letter) that will both delineate the space in which she is still a daughter and prevent the invasion of the space in which she is already a mother. This attempt fails twice: she cannot return to the (physical and emotional) space in which she holds the role of a daughter, and in attempting to do so she makes of her own daughter a de facto orphan. Tirtza is also the name of a protagonist orphaned by her mother in the acclaimed novella In the Prime of Her Life by Shmuel Yosef Agnon,3 the first Hebrew writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (together with Nelly Sachs) in 1966. Tirtza in Agnon’s novella is also the daughter of a dysfunctional mother. Her mother, who “died in the prime of her life,”4 is described by her daughter in her sickness and her longing for Akaviah Mazal, Orphanhood and Motherhood ][ 23 her first and only love, though never as a mother. The Tirtza in Agnon’s novella , just like Tirtza’s daughter in Ravikovitch’s story, cannot get her mother’s attention despite desperate attempts. In her touching struggle for attention she pretends to be Akaviah Mazal, the person her mother is longing for. She understands that her only way to enter her mother’s (emotional and concrete ) spectrum is by pretending not to be her daughter. Thus, whereas Tirtza in Agnon’s novella is the daughter who denies her own subjectivity in order to gain her mother’s affection, Tirtza in Ravikovitch’s story is the mother who struggles with her own subjectivity, and loses her children emotionally as a result. A more developed variation of maladjusted motherhood can be found in Ravikovitch’s “The Lights of Spring” (Orot haaviv). This story, in which the main character adopts a girl who had been orphaned by her mother, describes a situation that seems more like the protagonist’s fantasy than any literary reality. The identity of the adopted girl is unknown: “I don’t know whose girl she was, but she was not mine” (Winnie Mandela’s, 138). Yet the relationship between the unloved girl and the protagonist—who becomes a mother almost against her will—is very similar in essence to the one in “Tirtza in the Snow.” Just like “the little one” in the latter story, so too the girl in “The Lights of Spring,” despised her father and wanted me [the protagonist]. . . . the little one did not want to be lost and she wanted me...