Salty humor in a sad heart

Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker was an American writer and poet, born Dorothy Rothschild to Jacob Henry and Eliza Annie Rothschild Eliza Annie(née Marston) at 732 Ocean Avenue in the West End village of Long Branch, New Jersey, where her parents had a summer beach cottage. Dorothy's mother was of Scottish descent, and her father was of German-Jewish descent (unrelated, however, to the Rothschild banking dynasty).


Her mother died in West End in July 1898, when Parker was a month shy of turning five. Her father remarried, in 1900, a woman named Eleanor Francis Lewis. Parker detested her father and stepmother, accusing her father of being physically abusive and refusing to call Eleanor either "mother" or "stepmother," instead referring to her as "the housekeeper." grew up on the Upper West Side, and attended Roman Catholic elementary school at the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament, despite having a Jewish father and Protestant stepmother.

She was asked to leave following her characterization of the Immaculate Conception as "spontaneous combustion." Her stepmother died in 1903, when Parker was nine. Parker later went to Miss Dana's School, a finishing school in Morristown, New Jersey. Her formal education ended when she was 13. Her father died in 1913. Following his death, she played piano at a dancing school to earn a living while she worked on her verse.


She sold her first poem to Vanity Fair magazine in 1914 and some months later, she was hired as an editorial assistant for another Condé Nast magazine, Vogue. She moved to Vanity Fair as a staff writer following two years at Vogue. In 1917, she met and married a Wall Street stock broker, Edwin Pond Parker II (March 28, 1893 in Hartford, Connecticut - ?), but they were separated by his army service in World War I.


She had ambiguous feelings about her Jewish heritage given the strong antisemitism of that era and joked that she married to escape her name. In 1919, her career took off while writing theatre criticism for Vanity Fair, which she began in 1918 as a stand-in for the vacationing P. G. Wodehouse. At the magazine she met Robert Benchley, who became a close friend, and Robert E. Sherwood.


The trio began lunching at the Algonquin Hotel on a near-daily basis and became founding members of the Algonquin Round Table. The Round Table numbered among its members the newspaper columnists Franklin Pierce Adams and Alexander Woollcott. Through their re-printing of her lunchtime remarks and short verses, particularly in Adams' column "The Conning Tower," Dorothy began developing a national reputation as a wit.


Parker's caustic wit as a critic initially proved popular, but she was eventually terminated by Vanity Fair in 1920 after her criticisms began to offend powerful producers too often. In solidarity, both Benchley and Sherwood resigned in protest.

When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, she and Benchley were part of a "board of editors" established by Ross to allay concerns of his investors. Parker's first piece for the magazine appeared in its second issue.


Parker became famous for her short, viciously humorous poems, many about the perceived ludicrousness of her many (largely unsuccessful) romantic affairs and others wistfully considering the appeal of suicide. Her greatest period of productivity and success came in the next 15 years.


In the 1920s alone she published some 300 poems and free verses in outlets including the aforementioned Vanity Fair, Vogue, "The Conning Tower" and The New Yorker along with Life, McCall's and The New Republic. Parker published her first volume of poetry, Enough Rope, a collection of previously published work along with new material in 1926. The collection sold 47,000 copies and garnered impressive reviews.


The Nation described her verse as "caked with a salty humor, rough with splinters of disillusion, and tarred with a bright black authenticity." Although some critics, notably the New York Times, dismissed her work as "flapper verse," the volume helped cement her status, as the New York World review put it, as "one of the most sparkling wits who express themselves through light verse."

Parker released two more volumes of verse, Sunset Gun (1927) and Death and Taxes (1931), along with the short story collections Laments for the Living (1930) and After Such Pleasures (1933). Not So Deep as a Well (1936) collected much of the material previously published in Rope, Gun and Death and she re-released the fiction with a few new pieces in 1939 under the title Here Lies.


In 1924, Parker collaborated with fellow Algonquinite George S. Kaufman on a one-act play, Business is Business. She next collaborated with playwright Elmer Rice to create Close Harmony. The play was well received in out-of-town previews and was favorably reviewed in New York but closed after a run of just 24 performances. It did, however, become a successful touring production under the title The Lady Next Door.


Some of her most popular work was published in The New Yorker in the form of acerbic book reviews under the byline "Constant Reader" (her response to a moment of whimsy in A. A. Milne's The House at Pooh Corner: "Tonstant Weader fwowed up.").

Her reviews appeared semi-regularly from 1927 to 1933, were widely read, and were later published in a collection under the name Constant Reader in 1970. Her best-known short story, "Big Blonde", published in The Bookman magazine, was awarded the O. Henry Award as the best short story of 1929.

Her short stories, though often witty, were also spare and incisive, and more bittersweet than comic. She eventually separated from her husband and had a number of affairs, including with reporter-turned-playwright Charles MacArthur and the publisher Seward Collins.


Her relationship with MacArthur resulted in a pregnancy, which Parker aborted, and a depression that culminated in her first attempt at suicide. Edwin and she divorced in 1928. It was toward the end of this period that Parker began to become politically aware and active. What would become a lifelong commitment to left-leaning causes began in 1927 with the pending executions of Sacco and Vanzetti.


Parker travelled to Boston to protest the proceedings. She and fellow Round Tabler Ruth Hale were arrested, and Parker eventually pleaded guilty to a charge of "loitering and sauntering," paying a $5 fine. In 1934, she married Alan Campbell, an actor with aspirations of being a screenwriter. (Like Parker, he was half-Jewish and half-Scottish.)


He was reputed to be bisexual—indeed, Parker did some of the reputing by claiming in public that he was "queer as a billy goat". The pair moved to Hollywood and signed ten-week contracts with Paramount Pictures, with Campbell (who was also expected to act) earning $250 per week and Parker earning $1,000 per week.


They would eventually earn $2,000 and in some instances upwards of $5,000 per week as freelancers for various studios. She and Campbell worked on more than 15 films. In 1936, she contributed lyrics for the song "I Wished on the Moon", with music by Ralph Rainger. The song was introduced in the The Big Broadcast of 1936 by Bing Crosby. With Robert Carson and Campbell, she wrote the script for the 1937 film A Star is Born, for which they were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing - Screenplay.


She wrote additional dialogue for The Little Foxes in 1941 and received another Oscar nomination, with Frank Cavett, for 1947's Smash-Up, the Story of a Woman. In 1944, Parker and Alexander Woollcott collaborated to produce an anthology of her work as part of a series published by Viking Press for servicemen stationed overseas.


With an introduction by Somerset Maugham the volume compiled over two dozen of Parker's short stories along with selected poems from Enough Rope, Sunset Gun, and Death and Taxes. It was released in the United States under the title The Portable Dorothy Parker. Parker's is one of only three of the Portable series (the other two being William Shakespeare and The Bible) to remain continuously in print.


During the 1930s and 1940s period, Parker became a more vocal advocate of increasingly radical left-wing causes, a fierce civil libertarian and civil rights advocate and a frequent critic of those in authority. She reported on the Loyalist cause in Spain for the Communist New Masses magazine in 1937. At the behest of Otto Katz, a covert Soviet Comintern agent and operative of German Communist Party agent Willi Muenzenberg, Parker helped to found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in 1936.


The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League's membership eventually grew to some 4,000 strong, whose often wealthy but mostly unsuspecting members were, in the words of David Caute, "able to contribute as much to [Communist] Party funds as the whole American working class."


Parker also served as chair of the Joint Anti-Fascist Rescue Committee. She organized Project Rescue Ship to transport Loyalist veterans to Mexico, headed Spanish Children's Relief and lent her name to many other left-wing causes and organizations. Her former Round Table friends saw less and less of her, with her relationship with Robert Benchley being particularly strained (although they would reconcile).


Her marriage with Campbell was tempestuous, with tensions exacerbated by Parker's increasing alcohol consumption and Alan's long-term affair with a married woman while he was in Europe during World War II. They divorced in 1947, then remarried in 1950, and remained married (although they lived apart from 1952–1961) until his death in 1963 in West Hollywood.


Parker's final screenplay was The Fan, a 1949 adaptation of Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, directed by Otto Preminger. Parker was heard occasionally on radio, including Information Please (as a guest) and Author, Author (as a regular panelist). She wrote for the Columbia Workshop, and both Ilka Chase and Tallulah Bankhead used her material for radio monologues. Parker was listed as a Communist by the publication Red Channels in 1950.


The FBI compiled a 1,000-page dossier on her because of her suspected involvement in Communism during the McCarthy era. As a result, she was placed on the Hollywood blacklist by the movie studio bosses. In 1952 Parker moved back to New York, into the Volney residential hotel. She drew upon her experiences there to co-write, with Arnaud d'Usseau, the play Ladies of the Corridor. The play opened in October 1953 to uneven reviews and closed after six weeks. From 1957 to 1962 she wrote book reviews for Esquire, though these pieces were increasingly erratic owing to her continued abuse of alcohol.


Her favorable nod gave Ellison a foothold with both mainstream publishers and film producers, and shortly afterwards he headed for Hollywood. In 1961 Parker returned to Hollywood and reconciled with Campbell.


They worked together on a number of unproduced projects; among her last was an unproduced film for Marilyn Monroe. Parker found Campbell dead in their home in 1963, a suicide by drug overdose. Following Campbell's death, Parker returned to New York City and the Volney.


In her later years, she would come to denigrate the group that had brought her such early notoriety, the Algonquin Round Table: Parker died of a heart attack at the age of 73 in 1967. In her will, she bequeathed her estate to the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. foundation. Following King's death, her estate was passed on to the NAACP.


Her executrix, Lillian Hellman, bitterly but unsuccessfully contested this disposition. Her ashes remained unclaimed in various places, including her attorney Paul O'Dwyer's filing cabinet, for approximately 17 years.

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)