Hollow generation

Dahlia Ravikovitch


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.

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.


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.



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.

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 ...



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."

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. 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.



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: (Courtesy:Haartezz.com)