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ABSTRACT
This article attempts to explain the particular position of Dahlia Ravikovitch among her fellow poets of the Statehood Generation (1950s-1960s) and in Israeli literature in general-namely, the triangular connection between poetics, gender, and canon in the young Israeli-Hebrew culture. I argue that the founding of the nation-state instigated far-reaching changes in the life, structure, and symbolic identity of the nation, and it is in light of these changes that Israeli culture should be analyzed. The main change was the death of constitutive Zionist desire, by which the nation underwent several shifts, one of which was from a masculine to a feminine symbolic identity. Reading Ravikovitch's poem "Dyokan yehudi" and connecting it to other poems, I argue that, in this "feminine" stage of the nation, she fills the previously masculine function of the national poet (and the poet-prophet).
Key words: Modern Hebrew literature, women's literature, Dahlia Ravikovitch, Zionism, Israel
The leading Israeli poet Dahlia Ravikovitch (1936-2005) published her first collection, Ahavat tapuah ha-zahav (Love of the Orange)1 in 1959. It won great acclaim from critics of all schools and generations, especially from her peers, the young poets and critics of the emerging new literary group called "Likrat" ("Toward," later known as "Dor ha-medinah" or "the Statehood Generation"). They had begun writing and publishing only a few years earlier, in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, vehemently rebelling against their predecessors from the 1940s. The dominant symbolist poetics of Nathan Alterman, Avraham Shlonsky, and Leah Goldberg-with its musical rhythms, rich metaphors, high-flown language, pathos, and glorification of heroism and death-were seen in the late 1940s as impersonal and as obscuring the individual experience. In order to express the specific life experience of the individual person, the Statehood Generation poets favored free verse and internal rhyme, plain language, a prosaic and subdued tone, and a focus on the daily lives of ordinary people. This was explicitly proposed as the appropriate representation of reality in the young State of Israel, immediately following the War of Independence, as set out in the manifesto of the Likrat group from 1952:
Our reality is no longer the exciting reality of the war years. Our reality is grey, faded, and austere. . . . [T]hat innocence, the youthful belief that...