Dahlia Ravikovitch: 'The Greatest Hebrew Woman Poet of All Time'?

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Dahlia Ravikovitch was a great poet in her time who remains equally great in ours. Brilliantly Modernist and resonantly Biblical, intimate and wide-ranging, acutely insightful and stirringly musical, multi-layered and colloquially direct, her poems are a thrilling discovery if you haven’t read her yet. And although she died in 2005, Ravikovitch’s poetry speaks very much to Israel’s chaotic current moment—and to that of the world, for that matter.

Ravikovitch has been called such things as “the central pillar of Hebrew lyric poetry,” and many, her translators say, consider her “the greatest Hebrew woman poet of all time.” Besides such plaudits, her work has been credited as having powerful influence beyond poetry, “launching Israeli feminism even before it became an explicit focus of social and cultural debate.”

A leading voice of the “statehood generation” of Israeli poets, Ravikovitch seems to straddle all of that nation’s history, and, unlike her peers, has a foot firmly planted in its current struggles. From the early 1980s on, she wrote many poems protesting Israeli military actions and “campaigned for Palestinian rights, and against messianic settler nationalists.” Yet she went her own way in many respects, criticizing what she regarded as the "culture of nothingness" of fellow Israeli secularists. Indeed, her verse can be passionately spiritual, especially when it gathers up the music of the Biblical texts that were native to her. For example, here are the concluding lines of “Delight,” an early sonnet, in which her lyrical Hebrew can almost be heard through the translated English:

And indeed it came to pass on Sabbath day
And tree boughs lusted for the sky with all their might
And then did I know a delight beyond all delight.

In a recent lecture on Modern Israeli poetry, Barbara Mann, a Jewish Theological Seminary professor, opined recently that “after Amichai,” Ravikovitch is “the most influential Hebrew poet of the last 25 years.” And yet, despite the 2009 publication of Hovering at a Low Altitude, the superb English translation of Ravikovitch’s collected poetry by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld, and the fact that when the poet died in 2005 it was front-page news in Israel, she is little known in the United States. In contrast to her relative anonymity, of course, anyone here who knows anything about Israeli culture knows the name Yehuda Amichai.

But great as Amichai’s work is—I see him as Israel’s Walt Whitman—the poems of Ravikovitch, who was a dozen years younger, speak much more directly to current times. Her emotionally charged verse seems more in tune with the chaotic state of Israel in 2021 and the currently fragmented state of our post-Covid psyches than Amichai’s does. Much of this may have to do with the up-close and personal sense of witness her poems bring to war, charged as they are with the experiences of women, mothers, and the plight of Palestinians.

Ravikovitch’s first poems, which began to appear in newspapers and journals during her military service in the late 1950s, seem to embody a feminism that would be very recognizable to Americans today. Like those of Adrienne Rich, her senior by seven years, her early poems are tightly formal, allusive, and subtly expressive of the constricting circumstances of young women’s lives. Also like Rich, Ravikovitch’s work underwent a major mid-career move to more politically engaged verse—even as it stayed absolutely true to the art of poetry and to her specific personal vision.

One of the best examples of that first phase of Ravikovitch’s work is “A Clockwork Doll,” a sonnet published in Israel in 1959 when the poet was 23. If English-language readers have encountered any poem of hers, it’s likely to be this one. I love the Hebrew word Ravikovitch uses for doll—it’s pronounced boobah—and the allusion to Humpty-Dumpty. Robert Friend’s translation, the finest I’ve encountered, begins:

I was a clockwork doll that night,
and I turned left and I turned right
and when I fell and broke to bits,
they recomposed my wax and wits.

Once the doll is reconstructed by an impersonal “they,” the sense of social repression—even brainwashing—becomes palpable: “I was a proper doll once more,/ my manner carefully demure[.]” That phrase “carefully demure” seems to reveal the state of mind of an entire generation of young women in the 1950s.

I dislike interpreting poems biographically, but there were indeed many instances of things breaking apart and being put back together in Ravikovitch’s life. Born in 1936, in Ramat Gan, a suburb of Tel Aviv in British Mandate Palestine, she reportedly could read and write at the age of three.

Dahlia’s mother, Michal, was a teacher born in Rehovot, a city about 12 miles south of Tel Aviv. Her father, Levi, a Russian-born engineer, came to Palestine in the early 1930s by way of Harbin, China, where he was a leader of the Betar Zionist youth movement. The movement, a reaction to the rise of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, flourished in Harbin in the 1930s, offering intensive sports training programs aimed at building up the proficiency of Jewish youth for self-defense. The Guardian describes Levi as “a rationalist,” while reporting that Michal came “from a religious household.”

In 1942, her mother gave birth to the twin brothers Ahikam and Amiram. In that year, when Dahlia was six years old, perhaps the greatest trauma of her life occurred: Her 31-year-old father was run over and killed by a drunken Greek soldier. It left his daughter, in the words of one source, “with a permanent sense of loss and orphanhood.” Levi’s presence—or absence—shadows many of her poems. One of the most direct of these is “On the road at night there stands the man.” Starkly, and with the simple force of a gothic fairy tale, it begins:

On the road at night there stands the man
Who once upon a time was my father.
And I must go down to the place where he stands
Because I was his firstborn daughter.

After Levi’s death, Michal moved the family to Kibbutz Geva in the Jezreel Valley in northern Palestine and married a kibbutz member. Dahlia, reportedly feeling herself a misfit, left the kibbutz when she was 13 and lived with a series of foster families in Haifa.

Ravikovitch was married and divorced twice. At age twenty, she was married to the writer Yosef Bar-Yosef, a union that lasted just three months. Her second and longer marriage was to Yitzhak Livni, a media personality and writer. Later, Ravikovitch lived with attorney Hayyim Kalir for 13 years. In 1979, when Dahlia was 42, she had a son, Ido, with Kalir. Eleven years later she experienced another life trauma when the couple broke up and she lost custody of Ido. The weight of her emotions around that time are apparent in “To Everything There Is A Season,” a poem published a few years later:

The child is gone for a hundred years,
A hundred years commence today.
He may come back for an hour or a day
but he won’t stay.

Ravikovitch’s poetry frequently resonates with Biblical texts, and the poem’s title comes, of course, from the famous line from Ecclesiastes.

Unfortunately, her working life was compensated much more with recognition than with money. After studying English literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the 1950s, Ravikovitch earned a living in journalism for a while, working for the daily Ma’ariv and other publications. In the 1980s she resigned from the paper and “lived in perpetual anxiety regarding her livelihood .”

One blog post sums up her situation well:

“For a woman whose work received so many prizes over the years, she did not do well...in the academic or publishing marketplace when it comes to positions or jobs, and at the end of her life she was living in what is described as ‘a modest apartment in Tel Aviv, near the Mediterranean, barely eking out a living’ as a journalist, TV & theater critic, high school teacher, writer of popular lyrics. She translated into Hebrew poems by Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Poe and others, as well as children’s classics, such as Mary Poppins. She is said to have suffered from severe depressions; when she was found dead in her apartment, it was at first assumed she killed herself.”

In the event, it was established that Ravikovitch did not kill herself, but died of heart failure in Tel Aviv at the age of 69. When she died, there was a huge outpouring of public grief—appropriately so, for the leading poet of a nation where poetry is unusually significant. Her accomplishments had been formidable. She published more than 20 books of poetry in her lifetime, three collections of short stories, eight children’s books, and various translations of children’s classics and English poetry. In 1998, she was awarded the Israel Prize, the state’s highest cultural honor, and the judges showered her with praise in their statement:

“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.”

Eloquent as the judges were, they snatched their metaphor from “The Central Pillar,” the title of a poem in Ravikovitch’s first book, The Love of an Orange. The “central pillar,” an image from the Kabballah, is the “repository of all souls, supporting the four points of the compass,” literally “the four winds of the heavens,” according to a note to the poem by Bloch and Kronfeld. Ringing out with lines from the Psalms, the poem appears to reverse the fate of the Tower of Babel:

Every soul shall praise the Lord,
Shall have no end in the central pillar.
The central pillar of the rising sun,
The central pillar of the setting sun.

Prophetic and musically resonant as many poems in her first four books were, Ravikovitch made a strong poetic shift from the spiritual to the political beginning in 1982, just before the Israel Defense Forces invaded southern Lebanon, and the First Lebanon War began.

In an interview with Bloch and Kronfeld, Ravikovitch invoked the title of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar in explaining what impelled her to write political and war poetry: “Till the invasion of Lebanon, 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.”

The collapsing of walls during this phase is evident in some of the widest-ranging yet precisely focused poems in all her work. One particular example of how a Ravikovitch poem melds the personal and political, offering a truth composed of multiple truths, is the extraordinary “A Jewish Portrait.”

The poem is dated July 4, 1982, just two days before Israel invaded Lebanon. It was a day when Israelis were likely to be aware of refugees pouring into the country from Lebanon, and that is the scene the poem sets. In Hebrew, the title can mean either “Portrait of a Jew” or “Portrait in the Jewish Manner,” according to Bloch and Kronfeld.

That ambiguity blurs distinctions between two different ways of seeing on display throughout the poem, they suggest. If Ravikovitch is painting the portrait of a Jew, on the one hand, that Jew is most certainly the woman described in the poem’s first lines:

She
is not your sort.
She’s a Diaspora Jew whose eyes dart around
in fear.
Wears an old-fashioned dress,
her hair pulled back without a bit of grace.
Doesn’t undo her bundles.

If, on the other hand, this is a portrait in the Jewish manner, what kind of manner is that? We get the answer in the third line. To portray things in a Jewish manner is to paint them in the way a Diaspora Jew might see them: as a refugee sees them. Thus, in the second stanza, the woman—shabbily dressed, shlepping all her worldly goods around on her back—focuses on an exodus:

Caravans pass her by,
Ukrainian peasants in their carts
and dark-skinned refugees, screaming;
babes in arms dry up in the sun,
flies clinging to their eyes.

And, very similarly to the woman, the refugees “carry mattresses on their heads,/a clangor of pots and pans.”

To be sure, there are differences between the woman and the refugees: most importantly, she has a house—and a home in Israel—and they do not. (In the last line of the poem, she is identified, with some irony, I think, as “third generation in the Land of Israel.”) Further, from the perspective of those hurrying across the border, she is like a slow driver in a traffic jam: “People curse her as she goes by: She’s slow,/slowing down the caravan.”

But they are walking along the same road, observers of the same transitory nature of existence. The name “Hebrew” is, after all, believed to be based on the Semitic root ʕ-b-r (עבר) meaning "beyond," "other side," or "across." Interpretations of the term "Hebrew," as referring to the people rather than the language, generally render its meaning as folks "from the other side” of the river or desert.

In “A Jewish Portrait,” at least, Jews—even those living in a nation established 73 years ago—are essentially a people who have come from somewhere else and who carry that perspective with them wherever they go. Considering that heritage, Dr. Mann posed a challenging question in her recent lecture: Who in the poem is the more exiled, and therefore the more Jewish? Is it the Diaspora woman who has nevertheless been rooted in Israel for three generations, or the Palestinians coming over the border at that very moment? “In the world of the poem,” she said, “the most exiled are the Palestinians, and therefore they are the most Jewish.”

With questions of race and identity so vexed these days, the complexity of perspective that Dahlia Ravikovitch brought to her poems makes her very much a poet of this moment.