Dahlia Ravikovitch. Something in the clarity of her work crossed the lines and touched many people who do not fall within the conventional criteria of readers of poetry. (Photo courtesy of Ido Kalir)
We are the hollow people. We are the people stuffed with dubious chemical substances. We are the people who do not want to live ... We are people who do not want to live without metaphysical justification. We are made of the opposite. On the face of things, we are the ultimate traitors. We are not capable of fulfilling expectations and we are not capable of bearing the obligation of loyalty, not even to those who are closest to us. The sun rises and sets. The flowers bloom and wither. The fruit ripens and falls, and only we expect happiness that is greater than any happiness, the happiness of absence. No greater love have we than the love of the world that transpires without us.
The expectation is exhausting and enervating. Day after day brings renewed awakening into the nothing that is pain bereft of honor and shorn of hope. If despair were strength and not weakness, it would uproot mountains and grind them into one another.
- Dahlia Ravikovitch, May 13, 1998
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Dahlia Ravikovitch died on August 12, 2005, in her home in Tel Aviv. Her death was sudden and came as a shock to many. The initial conjecture was that she had committed suicide. Her fragility and vulnerability were a central axis of her poetry and her life. But the coroner's report found that she had not taken her own life; the autopsy did not find an unusual quantity of medicines in her body. The conclusion was that "her death was probably caused by acute failure of the heart." She was only 69. Wise, beautiful, versed in suffering. Revered poet, writer and translator.
In August 1983, in the poem "Draft," which originally appeared in her book "Real Love" (1987), she wrote:
Not to leave traces
Not to scatter signs
Anyway I am not staying in this place.
Not to write letters
Not to collect souvenirs,
Photographs,
Not to arrange them in threes in albums.
Not to collect documents,
Not to store up in summer
Not to whitewash, not to renovate
Not to settle down ...
In contrast to the poem, Dahlia Ravikovitch did seek to leave traces, both clear and careful. She was involved in the editing of her books of poetry. She did not throw out anything she wrote. After her death her son, Ido Kalir, organized her estate in 10 large cartons. He still hasn't decided what to do with "this treasure." He would like to keep it for himself, but is aware of the need to store the contents in a way that will preserve them for the sake of history and Hebrew culture. Generously, Kalir allowed us to look through the material and choose poems, articles, stories and letters - the great majority of which are still unpublished.
It was a moving and far-from-easy experience. Ravikovitch's complex biography is laid out here lengthwise and widthwise and in depth as well. She kept hundreds of letters that she received from literary people and poets and from anonymous fans. Bank statements and municipal tax assessments and electricity bills are stuffed between the pages here and there. There are hundreds of photos of her throughout her life, from infancy. Letters from Mom. Paintings by Mom's only child. Rhymes he uttered as a child which she jotted down. Versions of short stories. Essays and articles she wrote. Letters to public figures, faxes to friends. A whole abundant world. Documentation of moments of joy and happiness and also of depressions too heavy to be borne, disappointments due to those who are close to her, and also to some who are distant.
Ravikovitch did not have a computer and never wrote on a typewriter. Throughout her life, she used a pen. In her last years she preferred yellow binders that replaced the checkered spiral exercise books and the notebooks with the hard brown covers of the 1950s and 1960s. The earliest poems in her literary estate, dating from second grade, are in a thin notebook with a rough brown-paper cover:
Tu Sivan [15th day of the month of Sivan]
My Granddad
A. My granddad - he is not with us.
Is not among all those who come
Does not come to pray every morning
With the other granddads
B. My granddad is not with us anymore
He is only in the pictures
And his face is just like Dad's,
Happy and not old at all ...
Ido Kalir noted this week that he was surprised both by how organized the material is and also by how much there is. "I was especially surprised by the span of time and by the fact that she kept her childhood notebooks," he said. "I think she was aware of her value - not the financial value, but the literary and spiritual value of these materials. It was her conscious decision to keep everything."
What did you find most moving?
Kalir: "I knew many of the poems, including those that have not yet been published. But there are many photographs of her that moved me. Photographs of her as a little girl. The photo of her in a dress in the kindergarten in Ramat Gan. That is extremely moving and thrilling. Also her geography and physics notebooks, with the little drawings. I got to know her anew in so many forms from this material. I can't point to anything specific that I learned about her, but it is definitely the case that I got to know another four-five Dahlia Ravikovitches. You don't see your parents when you are a boy or a youth, and suddenly to see her notebooks and the photos was very exciting for me."
How would you like her to be remembered?
"I would like her to be remembered as an opinionated and individualistic woman. A woman who has her own path and has her ability and holds fast to them throughout her life. I would like people to remember her for her talent, which was extraordinary, and I would like people to make these poems part of their life."
Childhood
Dahlia Ravikovitch was born on November 27, 1936. Her father, Levy (Leo) Ravikovitch, was an engineer who loved poetry and who arrived in Palestine from Harbin, China, where he was the commander of a Betar (Revisionist youth movement) unit. He married Michal, a student in the Mizrahi teachers college for women, who became an educator in the land settlement movement. Dahlia Ravikovitch had a strong bond with her parents. She wanted to be Daddy's clever girl, and he identified and was amazed at her ability to read and write at the age of three.
A year later her mother wrote in a letter to her friend Rivka: "The true ray of light that casts its spell over our whole life is Dahlia. Such a wonderful girl, so developed and so interesting. She received the best from both of us and blended it well. Now she is immersed in other worlds - Haman, Hitler, Pharaoh and, may they be kept apart, the Prophet Elijah ... She likes very much to dress up and stands for half an hour at a time in front of the dresses and creates models for sewing (and is satisfied with that and does not actually make them)."
On September 9, 1940, Italian planes bombed Tel Aviv. More than 100 people were killed and many wounded. Four-year-old Dahlia and her mother were on the street at the time of the air raid.
A week later, her mother wrote to her girlfriend, in a letter which the daughter preserved: "As we were about to leave the place (on Pinsker Street), dreadful thunder was heard. Dahlia started to shout: Mother! Thunder! Instinctively, I entered a nearby building. In another building there were already people wounded. We left when the automobiles of the army and Hama'avir [a bus company] started to take away wounded people. I wanted to get home as quickly as possible, but it took an hour and a half. I had a feeling which, I think, is identical to that of a mouse in a trap. We were made to stand on Allenby Street and see all the horrors of the bombing - children, women and old people wounded and dead were taken away without end.
"That night Dahlia was very agitated. She slept with me in my bed. The whole night she pressed against me and mumbled: Mommy, I am afraid of the thunder! Sometimes it turned into crying while she trembled: I am afraid!! Now she always listens in case there is an air-raid siren. And when something falls she reassures me straightaway: 'It's nothing, Mommy, it's not a bomb.' Our poor children! What do they absorb in their tender soul?!"
When Dahlia was five and a half, her mother gave birth to twin boys, Ahikam and Amiram. When she was six, her father was killed when he was hit by a car on Jabotinsky Street in Ramat Gan. For two years the news of her father's death was kept from Dahlia. "On that day the family fell apart," she wrote years later (in the short story "A Brief History of Michal," in the collection "Come and Gone," Modan, 2005). In her first book of poetry, "The Love of an Orange" (1959), she described her father as a silent figure standing on the road all night and her need to approach him every night, because she is his first-born, without having a choice in the matter, while he is unable to utter even one word of love.
Kibbutz
Already during the week of mourning for their husband and father, Michal was persuaded to move to Kibbutz Geva with Dahlia and the twins, who were then a year and a half old. Michal remarried, but Dahlia never adjusted to life on the kibbutz. She, who included herself in the group of those who "are not capable of fulfilling expectations," she, whose son wants her to be remembered as an individualist - was unable to adjust to the Spartan conformism of the kibbutz "children's society."
In the story "The Tribunal of the Summer Vacation" (which appears in the 1976 short-story collection "Death in the Family"), one of the characters is Haim Gersten, who directs the work of this children's group on the kibbutz with unflinching cruelty. "As the children came down the stone stairs beneath the oleander trees, hard by the window of the infants' kitchen, Haim tried to stick the toes of his shoes into their bare heels, to make them quicken their pace. Sometimes he would step on a baby toe or big toe and the children got the hint."
Nurit, the protagonist of the story and Dahlia's surrogate, is a plump girl who is afraid of being late for work and therefore does not succeed in falling asleep during the afternoon nap. She always drinks before going to work, knowing that there will be no water at work. She is 11 and is called a "fat pig" by the other children: "When she stood up for a moment after bending over the furrows of carrots, the blood rushed to her face and her eyes were blinded ... Her palms hurt even worse than her back ached. They were afflicted with eczema and their skin was swollen and red ... The eczema burned so badly that she found it difficult to sleep. Maybe it was not just the eczema, but it is hard to believe that the sleep of an 11-year-old girl would be so bad. At night she dreamt that she had been assailed by a serious disease and was happy in her dreams."
In the story the boys snatch Nurit's hat and throw it into the mud, and she violates the greatest prohibition by leaving her job. She is subjected to a kind of trial by the school committee and sentenced to three extra workdays. When one of the girls comes to her defense, Haim roars: "In another 10 years - what am I saying? Seven years - she will no longer be here. She will live in the city. She will paint her lips. She will sit in cafes."
As the letters of Dahlia's mother reveal, this story is based on fact. Gersten is the fictional representation of H., who managed the children's work on Kibbutz Geva on a contract basis. From a letter by Michal: "I could tell you about spitting in the face by the 'educational figure,' a literal spitting, to which Dahlia was subjected for not doing her quota (I am responsible for what I am saying!). I could tell and testify about the real reason that the children did not lift their eyes when the train went by and why they did not run to water when they were thirsty, even on hamsin days, and why they did not utter a sound during work. And I know many more facts about 'education' for labor." The trauma of the summary judgment of the kibbutz children haunted Ravikovitch and her mother for years afterward.
In 1965, when Ravikovitch was already an established poet, her mother, Michal Gur Aryeh, was still settling accounts with Kibbutz Geva over the treatment of her daughter some 20 years earlier. When she heard that N., one of Dahlia's homeroom teachers - who had supported the actions taken with respect to the child at the time - was about to be appointed principal of an educational institution, she lost no time protesting:
I am writing this letter not because I am the mother who sat and cried to H., so he would take back what he said to the children - 'Do what you will to her, because she will go to the city,' and he replied, 'But that is what I really think' (the reference was to Dahlia, and this was the period of the 'personality cult' of H. in Geva) - but mainly because of my deep shock (from which I have not recovered to this day, and I simply tremble when I remember his words) at the case of N., who is going to head a large educational institution for youth today and not in the 1940s or 1950s!
To purify an abomination - what is needed for that: Naivete? Blind faith? Or perhaps something that is far from what can be called 'good-heartedness' and the strength to admit to my badness if it is bad? And for this my heart is mournful.
All the best!
A notebook of poems that Ravikovitch wrote at the age of 12, found in her estate, contains a lengthy, rather gloomy poem ("Please don't read!" she jotted on the inside part of the page). These lines appear on the first of the poem's three pages:
And the time here passes in quarreling / In melancholy, murky loneliness ... And my life here is sorrow and tears / And sadness prevails here.
Even at that early stage, Ravikovitch attests, poetry had become her solace and avocation. At the end of this poem she makes a wish:
To create even one / Work that will light up the world ... / To immerse myself in creating / To contain my soul within it / And do not return to the body / And let not my fire go out / A work even if only one / That will cast light for all time to come / And to remain thus forever / Thus, always in the heights / Let it come only once / Let the tide come / I will express myself / And after will die ...
Acceptance
Dahlia left Kibbutz Geva at the age of 13 with her mother's consent. After completing high school, while going through five foster families in Haifa and continuing to write constantly, she entered the army. Military service made it possible for her to read and write, she related, but after eight months she was discharged for psychological reasons.
She liked to tell about her first visit to the home of the renowned poet Lea Goldberg, to show her poems she had written. How she arrived early and waited outside, tense and thrilled, for the appointed time. Goldberg chose three poems, which were published in the paper.
A scholarship enabled Ravikovitch to attend the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she studied Hebrew language, and both English and Hebrew literature. To make ends meet she worked as a high-school teacher. She pursued her studies for three years, but did not obtain a degree. In 1959 her first book of poetry, "The Love of an Orange," drew critical praise. The critic Baruch Kurzweil, known for his rigorous standards, wrote in Haaretz that her poems "bear the seal of originality. And even the recalcitrant exoticism of her poetry ... is an integral part of her poetic world, of her singular reality which rises to true poetry."
At the age of 24 Ravikovitch married the playwright Yosef Bar Yosef; they separated after three months. Two years later, in 1962, she married Yitzhak Livni (later the director general of the Israel Broadcasting Authority). The marriage ended in divorce three years later, but the two remained close friends until her death.
In 1964 her second book, "A Hard Winter," appeared and drew another laudatory appreciation from Kurzweil. "Sometimes I have the feeling," Ravikovitch said that year, "that my poems are better than me. I very much agree with the things I write. They do not surprise me, but they have the power to lift me above myself."
Among her other books of poetry [in Hebrew] are "The Third Book" (1969), "Calleth Unto Deep" (1976), "Real Love" (1987) and "Half an Hour Before the Monsoon" (1998). Interspersed with the poetry were short-story collections: "Death in the Family" (1976), "Winnie Mandela's Football Team" (1997) and "Come and Gone" (2005). She also wrote song lyrics and poems and stories for children, and translated poetry and children's books. Prizes were for her a type of essential economic remuneration, as there were periods in which she found herself in dire economic straits. She was the recipient of the Bialik Prize (1978), the Shlonsky Prize and the Prime Minister's Prize for Hebrew Writers (2005), and also was accorded the country's highest honor, the Israel Prize (1998). The prize's judges noted in their citation: "Ravikovitch is one of the pillars of Hebrew lyric poetry."
Something in the clarity of Ravikovitch's work succeeded in crossing the lines and touching many people who do not fall within the conventional criteria of fastidious and distant readers of poetry. Thus, one fan wrote her:
Shalom, Dahlia!
My name is Rafi and I am a worker in a steel factory in Holon.
In the summer of 1971, on the lawn of a kibbutz in the Jordan Rift Valley, a counselor sat and read to two girls and a guy from 'Young Poetry.' She handed me the book and said: Read. And I ('Poetry is for girls') read out the poem 'Hemda' and it wasn't bad, even beautiful.
Nine months later I entered the army and afterward the Yom Kippur War broke out, during which the love of my life at the time left me. I had to find solace, and on my first leave I went to a bookstore and asked for a book by Dahlia Ravikovitch. The salesman brought two books. I took 'A Hard Winter,' because it was better suited to the situation and in general. I read in my leisure hours in the army and didn't understand, but somehow enjoyed it (that is possible), and the guys laughed at me because I had been sold a book with short lines, and so thin, too, and for six pounds yet. That was how I bought my first book of poetry.
The years passed, flew by like a cloud, books by you and by others accumulated. And that is actually all I wanted to tell you - that I am pleased with everything you write in the paper and in your poems.
Fear not and be not dismayed. Be strong and of good courage!
Rafi,
Holon
Motherhood
In 1978 Dahlia Ravikovitch gave birth to a baby boy; the father was Haim Kalir, a lawyer, with whom Ravikovitch lived for about 13 years. After they separated, her son, Ido, was placed in the custody of his father, by court order. The boy's relations with his mother, which suffered ups and downs but also saw some wonderful moments, engendered no few poems. She wanted a C-section, because "the thought that I will lie on my back and scream, while being completely dependent on outside help, seems to me nightmarish. As Momo, the hero of Emile Ajar's book 'A Life Ahead,' remarks, the laws of nature are not such as to make it possible to rely on them," she wrote in a short article, excerpts from which are here published for the first time:
Apparently at 9:40 (because this is what the birth certificate states) I heard the crying of an infant in the room. A view of the room was blocked by an opaque curtain, as is undoubtedly the custom when the person undergoing surgery remains conscious. I might have been able to understand that the infant was mine, but because of that burden of thought, like bad hashish, I didn't really think thoughts. The flow of time was weird, too - both fast and slow.
I don't remember how many minutes passed until a diapered infant was placed on my bed next to my head and I only hoped that someone would take him from me quickly, because I was totally helpless and an infant must not be left for a second in the responsibility of a helpless adult. I was not curious to know what the boy looked like, because I had complete trust in him. A week later I received the birth certificate. It said: 'Male child born weighing 3.300 kilograms.' I never had a wish in my life that was realized in full and in a form that is absolutely the epitome of beauty (and I do not mean the beauty of the boy, about which there is also nothing to complain about) like that child, whose eyes were brown and whose head was covered with fairly long hair ...
And I - I had no further wishes for him. I did not hope that he would grow up and discover a cure for cancer or circle the world in a hot-air balloon or be a gifted child or the director general of the National Lottery, which is a far less prestigious job than the aforementioned ones, but nevertheless pays pretty well. I wanted that in all the days of his life to come, he would know satisfying contentment so that I would be pleased that he had been born, and that I would be a sufficiently good mother to contribute my share to that contentment, and henceforth begins a story which is already not mine and I have no right to tell it, and I trust my son to have enough words to tell his story.
But along with the moments of grace, depression battered Ravikovitch from an early age - the death of her father, life on kibbutz, the loneliness in Haifa, her distinctive personality make-up, the endless hunger for love. Ravikovitch suffered from depression during much of her life and gave this expression in her writing, which deals not only with love and motherhood, but zeroes in also on the bereavement, the suffering and the despair, which in her case was existential. In interviews she talked about the depression and the hospitalizations and the suicide attempts.
One of the poems in the estate is "Leaving Home," which describes the difficulty of meeting the expectations of a "normal" family woman. The poem was to have appeared in her collection "Real Love," but Ravikovitch left it in the notebook, probably because it was not fully polished. An excerpt:
In a small circle I say
I am fed up with the panties and the socks,
And with all the responsibility for the laundry,
And with sending the boy and receiving the boy
And being scolded
For a meatball that is not round. More...
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