Tikkun Magazine, November/December 2005

BOOK REVIEW

The Bell Jar Shatters: The Political Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch

by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld

At the end of August, Dahlia Ravikovitch, one of the great Hebrew poets of our time, was found dead in her apartment in Tel Aviv. The outpouring of grief in the Israeli media testifies to the the major role that Ravikovitch played in the world of Hebrew letters.

Ravikovitch was well-known for the fearless clarity with which she took on political issues, not only in her poetry but also in the public arena. She frequently participated in protests against the Occupation and the oppression of the Palestinians. Nor did Ravikovitch hesitate to speak out about Israeli society; as Lawrence Joffe noted in an obituary in the Guardian, "She campaigned for Palestinian rights, and against messianic settler nationalists, yet she also criticized her fellow Israeli secularists' 'culture of nothingness.'" Whenever Ravikovitch appeared on TV, speaking truth to power in her precise, unadorned language, undeterred and undeflected by the scripted pronouncements of politicians and generals, there would be a morning-after tempest in all the newspapers. Poets still have a vital presence in Israel, it appears—especially considering their marginality in our own society, where such a response would be unimaginable.

At a writers' conference in Berkeley in the late 1980s, we asked Dahlia Ravikovitch what made her turn so forcefully to the political in her poetry after years of writing primarily personal lyrics. Her answer came quickly: "Till the invasion of Lebanon [in 1982], I managed somehow to go on living inside a bell jar. But then suddenly, all at once, when the invasion started, the bell jar shattered. Now there's no wall between the political and the personal. It all comes rushing in."

At the time of her death, Dahlia Ravikovitch was considered Israel's greatest living poet. She produced a powerful body of work—ten volumes of poetry, three collections of short stories, and several books of childrens' verse—and translated Poe, Yeats, and Eliot, as well as children's classics, into Hebrew. A much-beloved poet, widely honored for her artistry and her courage, Ravikovitch enjoyed canonical stature from the beginning of her career, and was considered a cultural icon in Israel.

No other Hebrew poet, with the exception of the late Yehuda Amichai, was so universally embraced by Israelis, whatever their political convictions. Ravikovitch's poems, like Amichai's, were integrated into all facets of Israeli public life—set to music and adapted in theatrical productions, experimental films, dance performances, and art exhibits. Her work has long been a staple of the Israeli school curriculum, required reading for matriculation exams, as well as the subject of numerous articles, monographs and dissertations in Hebrew. And her poems have been appropriated by politicians past and present, who were given to reciting her work on public occasions even when clearly troubled by its critical stance.

Among Ravikovitch's many awards were the Bialik Prize, the major Israeli literary award, the Prime Minister's Prize, and the Israel Prize, the highest national honor. When awarding her the Israel Prize in 1998, the judges noted: "Her poetic style is distinguished by its skillful synthesis of a rich literary language with the colloquial idiom, and of her personal outcry with that of the collective. This has made her the most important—indeed the most distinctive—Hebrew poet of our time. She is the central pillar of Hebrew lyric poetry." Her poems have been translated into numerous languages, ranging from Arabic and Chinese to Serbo-Croatian and Vietnamese.

Ravikovitch was born in 1936 in Ramat Gan, a suburb of Tel Aviv. She studied English literature and Hebrew linguistics at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Her first book of poems, The Love of an Orange, appeared in 1959 when she was 23, immediately establishing her as one of the leading voices of the post-1948 generation, alongside her elders Yehuda Amichai and Natan Zach. This was followed by nine other books of poetry, including the collection All the Poems Till Now (1995), whose publication was a major event in Israeli cultural life, as well as three short story collections, the latest published just a few months ago. Ravikovitch also worked as a journalist, media critic, and teacher. She lived in Tel Aviv, which she loved and despised with the passion of an intimate: "Filthy Mediterranean city, how my soul is bound up with her soul. / Because of a lifetime, / an entire lifetime" ("Lying Upon the Waters"). For years she occupied the same small apartment on Yehoash Street, not far from the sea. It was there that Ravikovitch took her own life on August 21, after struggling for many years with severe depression.

The Israeli public was fascinated by her comings and goings; her reclusiveness and striking beauty lent her a kind of celebrity status. The color of the coat and shoes that she wore to public events was considered worthy of notice in the gossip columns. Several years ago, when she consented for the first time to be interviewed about her personal history, the popular daily Yediot Acharonot published a four-page spread with banner headlines proclaiming: "Our Greatest Poet Breaks Years of Silence." And this past December, on the eve of the publication of a volume of her autobiographical short stories, She Came and Went, the weekend magazine of that newspaper published a six page in-depth article about Ravikovitch's life and times, "The Burden of Loneliness," accompanied by full-page color photos. That burden has now become more manifest with her tragic death.

When she was six, Ravikovitch's father was killed by a drunken driver. She moved with her mother to a kibbutz but left at thirteen, moving from one foster home to another during her teenage years. The loss and displacement of these early years shaped her social sensibilities and informed her writing. "If I didn't know despair myself, I wouldn't be able to feel the anguish of the oppressed," she said in an interview.

Vulnerability was a major subject for Ravikovitch—"vulnerability on the verge of breakdown, as if her soul were fighting for its very life," in the words of Meir Wieseltier, the leading poet of the younger generation. But, as Wieseltier notes, her speakers wield that vulnerability, paradoxically, as a source of strength. Ravikovitch wrote of the emotional disconnect in the private as well as the social and political spheres—the self in a state of crisis refracting the moral distintegration of the nation.

In Ravikovitch's first four books of poems, the political poetry was veiled and distanced, either geographically (in poems about Australia, Chad, and Cameroon) or historically (the Roman conquests, the Crusades). But the late 70s marked a major turning point in her poetic development: a thoroughgoing assimilation of the political into the realm of personal nightmare. This was a period of great upheaval in Israeli society (Ha-Mahapakh), when Menachem Begin's Likud rose to power for the first time, routing the Labor Party and converting the economy to stock-market-driven capitalism. Then came Israel's incursions into Lebanon, culminating in the 1982 invasion. These shattering events coincided with the birth of Ravikovitch's son Ido—the "true love" in the title of her 1986 book of poems—which made her more attentive, if possible, to human vulnerability. It is during this time that she emerged as the leading poetic voice among feminist antiwar activists. From that point on, feminism and peace work became inseparable for her.

Ravikovitch's political activism attracted notice, and not just in the Israeli press. A revealing incident was cited in a 1997 article in US News and World Report, "Making Peace Where Politicians Fear to Tread: Israelis and Palestinians Who Defy the Extremists." Ravikovitch's expression of "defiance" was very much in character: she brought chocolates to a ten-year-old Palestinian boy she had befriended in Hebron, and arranged for a local Boy Scout troop to spend a day with Israeli teenagers in Haifa. This was the first time most of these Palestinian children had visited Israel proper, or spoken to an Israeli other than a soldier, according to the reporter, who added: "Such meetings are the staple of grassroots peace work. The goal is to break down stereotypes and give the 'enemy' a human face." In 1999, in a much-publicized incident, when the Israeli army evicted some 600 Palestinian cave-dwellers south of Hebron, claiming the areas as a closed military zone, Ravikovitch joined a handful of other writers to protest the attempted transfer of a Palestinian population—a dangerous precedent. In recent years, despite her frail health, she maintained her active engagement by word and deed, motivated always by a deeply intuitive understanding of the human pain at the heart of the ongoing political crisis.

The past two decades mark the crowning achievement of Ravikovitch's poetic project—the period when poetics and politics, the private and the public, merge with extraordinary expressive force in her work. Since the early 1980s her poetry has explored the parallels between the plight of the Palestinians, the suffering of Jews in the Diaspora, and the constraints on women in Israeli society. Ravikovitch speaks with authority for the forces of peace and justice, while representing with preternatural sensitivity a woman's critique of patriarchy. The depth and subtlety of her artistry enable her to treat these complex political and cultural issues in works that retain their considerable force as poetry.

In her recent poems, through a mostly female cast of characters, Ravikovitch reenacts Israel's political drama. There is, for example, the grieving Israeli mother who loses her son in a questionable military operation ("But She Had a Son," "What a Time She Had"), paired with a pregnant Palestinian woman who loses her fetus as a result of a beating by Israeli soldiers ("A Mother Walks Around"). There is the Israeli woman poet, subject to ridicule because of her critical stance toward the policies of her government ("Free Associating"). There is the young (apparently Arab) shepherdess who becomes a victim of rape and murder, and the Israeli woman who hovers surrealistically over the scene, watching from a safe distance and doing nothing ("Hovering at a Low Altitude")—"a parable," as Robert Alter has written, "of the moral untenability of detached observation in any political realm."

In "The Captors Require a Song," Ravikovitch invokes Psalm 137, a central text in Jewish cultural memory, which articulates the impossibility of singing the Lord's song in a state of exile and oppression:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we
remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song;
and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?

In a harrowing, sardonic reversal, Ravikovitch presents the Israelis as captors who violently extract a song from the throats of the displaced Palestinians:

Sing us one of the songs of Zion
for an ear that hears not...
Quick, sing us a new song,
a song we will yank from your
throat with pliers....
We hung your harps
far, far away
upon the willows.

Israeli-Palestinian politics are only a special case, albeit heightened, of the general concern that unifies Ravikovitch's oeuvre, a concern with the devastating consequences that unequal power relations present to the individual and society. This persistent interest in the dynamics of power is prefigured in her earliest poem, a parable about the passion of an orange for the man who eats it ("The Love of an Orange"). While the early work addresses this issue in poems about fathers and daughters, the dead and the living, the later work revisits it in poems about male-female relationships and the power of institutions like the army and the rabbinate over the lives of women and children. Even the mundane struggle for survival during economic hard times becomes a legitimate subject for poetry in these later works. As elsewhere, Ravikovitch's self-mocking humor deflates and de-sentimentalizes the poet's crisis: "To hell with the poem, what I need is 120 shekels" reads the first line of a poem called "Parnasa" ("Making a Living").

Ravikovitch's early poems employ traditional forms and a highly stylized, archaic language resonant with biblical and liturgical cadences, alongside experimental verse that draws upon surrealist parable and avant-garde opera. These poems are firmly situated in the Jewish textual echo-chamber, but their allusive style also reveals the influence of modernist Anglo-American poetry, particularly Eliot and the early Yeats. In her later work Ravikovitch consciously renounces the figurative riches of poetic language to make room for a stark poetry of statement. The result is an emotionally-charged simplicity and an enhanced focus on lyrical narrative and portraiture. Her emotional range is wide, from savage sarcasm, self-deprecating humor and pointed irony to restrained pathos and prickly ambivalence. In addition to her poetry about politics and the human condition, many poems explore questions of ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics with analytical rigor and "a cold incisive glance," as one critic called it. All of this is accomplished with poetic nuance and a subtle hand, held in check by skepticism and humility about her task as a poet.

The poems we are presenting here were written in the early 1990s, in response to the first Intifada. They are the work of a politically engaged poet who struggles to find meaning in a world ruled by warmongers. In translating them, we wish to honor that struggle. Now, more than ever, Ravikovitch's poems—provocative, unsettling, painfully moving—speak to our common plight. We believe that her complex view of a culture in crisis will have particular resonance for American readers today, given the increasing threats to free speech in our own society.

A MOTHER WALKS AROUND
 
A mother walks around with a child dead in her belly.
This child hasn't been born yet.
When his time comes the dead child will be born
head first, then belly and buttocks
and he won't wave his arms about or cry his first cry
and they won't slap his bottom
won't put drops in his eyes
won't swaddle him
after washing the body.
He will not resemble a living child.
His mother will not be calm and proud after giving birth
and she won't be troubled about his future,
won't worry how in the world to support him
and does she have enough milk
enough clothing
and how will she fit a cradle into the room.
The child is a perfect tsaddik already,
unmade ere he was ever made.
And he'll have his own little grave at the edge of the cemetery
and a little memorial day
and there won't be much to remember him by.
These are the chronicles of the child
who was killed in his mother's belly
in the month of January, in the year 1988,
"under circumstances relating to state security."
 
THE FRUIT OF THE LAND
a farewell song to the good old days
 
You asked if we've got enough cannons
They laughed and said: More than enough
and we've got new improved anti-tank missiles
and bunker busters to penetrate
double-slab reinforced concrete
and we've got crates of napalm and crates of explosives
unlimited quantities, cornucopias,
a feast for the soul, like some finely seasoned delicacy
and above all, that secret weapon,
the one we can't talk about.
Calm down, man,
the Intell Officer and the CO
and the Chief of Police
who's also a colonel in that hush-hush commando unit
are all primed for the order: Go!
and everything shined-up like the skin of a snake
and we've got chocolate wafers on every base
and grape juice and Tempo soda
and that's why we won't give in to terror
we will not fold in the face of violence
we will never fold, no matter what
with our heavy-duty billy clubs.
God who has chosen us from all the nations
comforteth with apples
the fighting arm of the IDF
and the iron boxes and the crates of fresh explosives
and we've got cluster bombs too,
though of course that's off the record.
Serve us bourekas and cake, O woman of the house
for we were slaves in the land of Egypt
but never again
and blot out the remembrance of Amalek
if you can track him down, and if you seek him in vain,
Blessed be the tiny match
that a soldier in some crack unit will suddenly strike
and set off the whole bloody mess.

Chana Bloch, author of three books of poetry, including the prize-winning Mrs. Dumpty, is co-translator of The Song of Songs, Yehuda Amichai's Selected Poetry and Ravikovitch's A Dress of Fire and The Window. Chana Kronfeld is Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley; her critical study, On the Margins of Modernism, won the MLA Scaglione Prize. Bloch and Kronfeld received the PEN Translation Award for their translation of Amichai's Open Closed Open and an NEA Award for The Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch.

Source Citation

Block, Chana & Kronfeld, Chana. 2005. The bell jar shatters: The political poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch. Tikkun 20(6):63.