Review: Ilana Szobel\'s A Poetics of Trauma: The Work of Dahlia Ravikovitch

Book Reviews A Poetics of Trauma: The Work of Dahlia Ravikovitch By Ilana Szobel. Waltham: Brandeis UP, 2013. xx + 177 pp. Dahlia Ravikovitch’s (1936-2005) oeuvre, while made available only in recent years to English readers primarily through the vibrant translations of Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld, has long been celebrated in Israel (her first collection of poems appeared in 1959), both for her singular artistry, and, in the final decades of her life, her searing political courage. Today she is widely regarded alongside Yehuda Amichai and Nathan Zach as one of the most revolutionary voices of Hebrew verse. Recipient of the Israel Prize (1998), Ravikovitch published ten volumes of poetry, as well as short story collections and books for children. Since her passing, there has been an outburst of posthumous celebration and truly illuminating criticism (by Nili Scharf Gold, Chana Kronfield, Barbara Mann, and others as well as Hamutal Tsamir and Tamar S. Hess’s Sparks of Light: Essays about Dahlia Ravikovitch’s Oeuvre, an edited collection of essays available only in Hebrew) but Ilana Szobel offers the first book-length treatment to date. An associate professor of Hebrew Literature at Brandeis University, Szobel’s theoretically rich and lively study is that rare work that genuinely provides both those previously unfamiliar with the poetry and those better acquainted, a plenitude of critical tools and important insights. A Poetics of Trauma is a timely, rigorous, and truly essential discussion of a poet whose oeuvre richly illuminates the fraught condition imposed by maternity, femininity, and the burden of gendered citizenship in the state of Israel. Ravikovitch is a poet whose work encompasses an extraordinary array of responses to experience, from the early solipsistic poetry that traverses exotic or mythic realms to substitute for deprivation and loss, to the later lyrics that demand the reader’s urgent attention to the quotidian and the political. And Szobel proves an authoritative and passionate guide to all of it. A Poetics of Trauma addresses an enormous range of works. In that regard, Szobel’s approach is admirably distinguished by its attention to lived experience, and Szobel ably addresses the devastating elements of the poet’s personal life (her father’s death when she was a young girl, debilitating struggles with depression, and other crucial biographical facets) and she is attentive to neglected creative work beyond the famous poetry (short stories, children’s literature, and translations). Though occasionally the treatment of the short fiction might seem too fleeting and fragmentary (presuming

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a prior familiarity on the part of the reader), Szobel’s lyrical analysis is always cogent and fulfilling. Indeed, to my mind she does that brilliantly, in close readings (the kind that are too often woefully scant in what passes for literary analysis) that are always fresh and profoundly stirring. A further strength of this book has to do with Szobel’s graceful (never jargonladen) interweaving of the postmodern philosophy and theoretical work of Elizabeth Grosz, Emmanual Levinas, Shoshana Felman, Luce Irigaray, and Jacques Lacan, among others. This enables Szobel to achieve a thoroughly cogent and often captivating foundation for the ambitious psychological and cultural dimensions of her study, especially when it comes to the subject of trauma (whether that of the private individual or the collective). It is hard to write both lucidly and with theoretical rigor but Szobel’s prose is exemplary in that regard; genuinely masterful at blending important insights gleaned from psychoanalytic and feminist theories of trauma, witness theory, and memory studies. Yet to her lasting credit, those interests never overshadow her own natural acumen for producing ambitious and highly independent close readings of salient issues (such as the poet’s portrayal of national identity and alienation, deviation from societal norms, madness, orphanhood, otherness, and repression), in her own terms. In examining these issues, the pivotal Hebrew term harigut emerges, which Szobel renders as “estrangement” even as she emphasizes the multiple denotations and rich layerings of the original: “otherness, difference, aberration, outsider-ness, minority, and dissidence” (39). As we come to recognize, Ravikovitch’s poetry is always brimming with this multiplicity, the presence of which produces a range of effects and colliding perspectives, poignant revelations of inner turmoil and a wounded soul that can be shattering. Szobel may be the first to highlight the pervasive presence of harigut throughout an otherwise shifting and varied poetics. Equally noteworthy is Szobel’s keen engagement with Ravikovitch’s poetics of witnessing in lyrics addressing Arab and Palestinian suffering, a preoccupation that became more pronounced and urgent following Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the First Intifada (1987). That inclination is especially explicit in “Hovering at a Low Altitude,” one of the poet’s highly representative and perhaps most harrowing indictment of atrocity, and the indifference of both the individual and the state to Palestinian suffering, a poem that Szobel revisits again and again as a sort of moral and aesthetic touchstone. For Szobel, Ravikovitch’s searing language of testimony constitutes a potent counternarrative to myth: “for taking responsibility for what

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is being seen. . . . a refusal of the option of escape. . . . that does not allow erasure or ignorance of the event or for the denial of complicity in its creation” (105, 106). Deepening this exploration of empathy and identification, Szobel reflects on the stirring poem “Lying Upon the Waters” (Shokhevet al hamayim) whose imagery, she argues, strategically blurs the demarcation between the two Mediterranean metropolises of Beirut and Tel Aviv: Filthy Mediterranean city, how my soul is bound up with her soul. Because of a lifetime, an entire lifetime. In her intelligent reading of this stanza and the evocative imagery of the surrounding lines, Szobel remarks that “if we take these lines to be about Tel Aviv” the lyric “becomes a love poem to the . . . secular Hebrew city, a modern monument to Israeli urbanism. Unlike the common depiction of Tel Aviv as the place where Israel meets the modern world . . . however, Ravikovitch locates Tel Aviv in the Middle East and does not allow her Israeli readers to distinguish themselves from that reality by identifying themselves as Western Europeans. [Yet] the lines could also be seen as referring to Beirut. The 1980s were an especially bleak time . . . much of the city lay in ruins as a result of the 1976 Karantina Massacre carried out by the Lebanese Front, the Syrian army shelling of Christian neighborhoods in 1978 and 1981, and the Israeli invasion in 1982.” In this poem and related works, Szobel explores how Ravikovitch’s female speaker invariably “identifies with suffering, regardless of nationality or political discourse. Even though Tel Aviv and Beirut could each be taken as the subject of the poem, I believe that the real subject is both of them together . . . at the center of the poem stands a recognition of the inability to distinguish between the two cities.” Accordingly, Szobel’s meditation on the crucial role of the self-within-the-other and the other-within-the-self within the poet’s moral imagination leads to the provocative assertion that: “No longer can the reader exclude the Mediterranean-Palestinian dimension from her Jewish-Israeli identity” (129-30). The critical discussion of this and allied works in the later section titled “Unveiling Injustice: Testimony, Complicity, and National Identity” (a sort of coda to the preceding chapters’ elaborate engagement with the troubled psychological currents and interiority of the earlier poetry) proves so tantalizingly consequential, one wishes that Szobel had devoted even more space to the poet’s provocative responses to militarism and politics

summer 2014

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and strikingly empathic responses to Palestinian displacement in her later career (apropos of which she aptly quotes Ravikovitch’s charged remark that “When the housing minister decided to confiscated lands from Arabs . . . I felt as if somebody had come to my place in order to confiscate part of my apartment”). Indeed, it might serve as the genesis for another book entirely. For, throughout her critically imaginative and elegantly written study, so attentive to the numerous and disparate facets of the writer’s oeuvre, Szobel manages to establish herself as one of Ravikovitch’s most compelling and authoritative interlocutors. Ranen Omer-Sherman University of Miami

Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof Alisa Solomon. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013. 448 pp. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the phenomenon that is Fiddler on the Roof. Since its first Broadway production in 1964, Fiddler has seen dozens of iterations, several of which are the subject of Alisa Solomon’s new book, Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof. In it she traces the cultural history of Tevye and his daughters from the original Yiddish stories by Sholem Aleichem, to the making of the musical directed by Jerome Robbins, to the 1971 movie staring the Israeli Chiam Topol in the role of Tevye, stopping along the way to discuss a more contemporary amateur production in Poland, as well as the racially and ethnically fraught 1968 Brownsville, Brooklyn performance starring black and Hispanic middle school students. Solomon uses these productions to demonstrate how Tevye the milkman became a cultural icon and why Fiddler on the Roof has managed to speak to disparate communities in the throes of cultural transition. What weaves Solomon’s chapters together is her well-articulated idea that the musical is not only a story about adaptation and survival, but also that the show itself is a beacon of the adaptive process. Solomon explains, for example, that while the escapist approach taken up by the Broadway musical offered a postwar audience a palatable and relatable Jewishness, the 1971 film, in the wake of changes taking place in America that demanded direct engagement with social, political, and cultural issues, was made to focus on the violence of the story and evoke the imagery and emotions connected with the Holocaust. What is more, Solomon shows that Fiddler’s staying power and world-wide popularity has as much to do with its univer-

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