“The Clockwork Doll” and Other Poems
“The Clockwork Doll” and Other Poems
by Dalia Ravikovitch
THE LITRARY WORK
Poems set mainly in Israel and Lebanon in the mid- to late-twentieth century; published in Hebrew from the 1950s to the 1980s in English in 1989.
SYNOPSIS
The collection explores war, racial and religious conflict, and women’s place in Israeli society.
Events in History at the Time of the Poems
Dalia Ravikovitch was born in 1936 in the suburb of Tel Aviv known as Ramat Gan; after the death of her father in a hit-and-run accident, she and her family went to live on a kibbutz. Ravikovitch later attended high school in Haifa and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She also served in the Israeli army, and it was during this period that her poems first appeared in newspapers and journals. In 1959 Ravikovitch published her debut collection of verse, Ahavat tapuah ha-zahav (The Love of an Orange), which established her as one of Israel’s foremost poets. Other volumes—Horefkasheh (1964; A Hard Winter), ha-Sefer ha-shelishi (1969; The Third Book), Tehum koreh (1974; Deep Calleth Unto Deep)—consolidated her reputation. In 1978 Ravikovitch’s poetry was first translated from Hebrew into English by American poet Chana Bloch in A Dress of Fire (1976). The Window, a second collection, with translations by Chana Bloch and Ariel Bloch, appeared in 1989. Spanning several decades, it builds from such poems as “The Clockwork Doll” and “Marionette” (“Bubah memukhenet,” 1959, and “Maryonetah,” 1969) to poems that deal with other topical concerns. In “You Can’t Kill a Baby Twice” and “Hovering at Low Altitude” (“Tinok lo horgim pa‘amayim,” 1986, and “Rehifah be-govah namukh,” 1986), Ravikovitch explores such concerns as war, cruelty, and the devastation in the wake of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
Events in History at the Time of the Poems
The status of women in modern Israeli society
During Ravikovitch’s lifetime, the role of women in Israeli society has been redefined. During the 1900s the first women who emigrated from Eastern Europe to Palestine—often called the halutsot (women pioneers)—showed dedication to a dream of socialism, equality, and justice in their reclaimed homeland. They expected to find fulfillment working the earth and toiling in the fields beside their male counterparts. The harsh climate, arduous working conditions, and ingrained male prejudices, however, undermined those expectations; most halutsot found themselves working in the kitchen and laundry instead, once again relegated to traditional domestic roles and duties.
Between the 1920s and 1940s, however, Jewish women in Palestine achieved some progress, mainly through the efforts of separate organizations, such as the Working Women’s Council. Golda Meir, the future prime minister, describes their struggle “not as one for ’civic’ rights, which they had in abundance, but for equal burdens. They wanted to be given whatever work their male comrades were given—paving roads, building houses, or standing guard duty—not to be treated as though they were different and automatically relegated to the kitchen” (Meir in Hazleton, p. 19).
One major result of this campaign for “equal burdens” was the inclusion of women in the armed forces, beginning with the Haganah, or Jewish defense organization, which existed from 1920 until Israel’s statehood in 1948 and was the precursor to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Although the responsibilities of Haganah women most often involved nursing the wounded and keeping the weaponry in fit condition, they were trained to use guns as well and some served in the fighting arm of the Haganah, the Palmach, during its seven years from 1941 to 1948. During the first stages of the War of Independence (1948-1949), women soldiers also carried out convoy duties, secretly transporting guns and grenades to Israeli troops. For the most part, however, Israeli women worked as nurses, wireless operators, and quartermasters, much as British women had done during World War II.
During the decades that followed, the status of Israeli women became increasingly ambiguous. From the formation of the state of Israel, even in provisional pre-state “governments,” women had the right to vote. Israel’s Declaration of Independence, issued in 1948, announced “The State of Israel will maintain equal social and political rights for all citizens, irrespective of religion, race, or sex” while the new Israeli government maintained that women would enjoy “equality in rights and duties, in the life of the country, society and economy, and throughout the entire legal system” (Hazleton, pp. 22-23). Laws passed during the 1950s, however, seemed to compromise or contradict those sentiments. For example, the Women’s Equal Rights Law of 1951 and the Rabbinical Courts Jurisdiction (Marriage and Divorce) Law of 1953 upheld the monopolistic and paternalistic control of the religious establishment over marriage and divorce for all Jewish citizens. According to rabbinic law, for example, the husband must grant his wife a divorce (known as a get); without his authorization, she is an “agunah” or “chained woman,” whose future marriages will be considered invalid, and future children illegitimate. In 1954 the Employment of Women Law forbade women from working at night on the grounds that it was injurious to their health. The existence and passage of such legislation undermined the statements in the Scroll of Independence, revealing that true social and political equality was still more a myth than a reality for Israeli women. Several of Ravikovitch’s early poems, including “Clockwork Doll” and “The Marionette,” explore the contradiction between the promise of full equality for women and their lack of it in everyday Israeli society.
Israeli involvement in Lebanon—an overview
In its first years of statehood, Israel made a point of cultivating friendly relations with Lebanon, an Arab country that might conceivably become an ally to the new nation. As early as 1954, David Ben-Gurion proposed that Israel support the Maronite Christians, who had held power in Lebanon. But internal rivalries in Lebanon complicated matters. The population of Shfite Muslims had by this time outstripped that of the Maronites and other groups and controversy raged over who should hold political posts. Civil war broke out in Lebanon in 1975. In keeping with Ben-Gurion’s earlier advice, Israel sold $118.5 million worth of arms to the Lebanese Christians in the first six years of war (Morris, p. 504).
Israel’s involvement in Lebanese affairs increased during the late 1970s after the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)—expelled from Jordan in September 1970—set up its major base of operations in southern Lebanon, from which it launched attacks on northern Israel. In March 1978, after a PLO guerrilla attack on the Tel Aviv-Haifa road killed 37 people, Israel retaliated with Operation Litani, a military offensive that led to the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon up to the Litani River. By June, however, under pressure from the United States, Israeli troops withdrew from the region, leaving the PLO stronghold in southern Lebanon essentially untouched. This development caused major embarrassment for the administration of Prime Minister Menachem Begin, which had come to power partly because of its hard-line security policy.
The Begin government endured similar embarrassment in 1981 when Maronite forces, known as the Phalangists, clashed with Syrian forces in Zahlah, a city in eastern Lebanon. Leading the Phalangists was Bashir Gemayel (also spelled Jumayyil). After Syrian troops drove his forces from Zahlah, Israel came to its ally’s defense by having its aircraft destroy two Syrian helicopters over Lebanon. In retaliation, Syrian president Hafez al-Assad moved Soviet missiles into Lebanon. Israel threatened to destroy the missiles but again was persuaded to back down by the American government.
After a narrow victory in the Knesset elections of June 1981, the Begin administration adopted a more aggressive defense policy, especially against the PLO presence in Lebanon. Ariel Sharon, an Israeli war hero, became Begin’s new minister of defense; he found an ally in General Raphael Eitan, another military man and the chief of staff under Begin. Together, Sharon and Eitan became the major arbiters of Israel’s defense policy. In July 1981, a month after the Knesset elections, Israel bombed PLO encampments in southern Lebanon in retaliation for PLO rocket attacks on northern Israeli settlements; with the help of U.S. envoy Philip Habib, a tentative ceasefire was eventually achieved.
Hostilities resumed in early June of 1982 after another Palestinian group, Abu Nidal, attacked Israel’s ambassador in London, Shlomo Argov. He was shot in the head and permanently paralyzed. Blame was mistakenly assigned to the PLO for the incident. On June 4, the Israeli air force bombed a sports stadium in the Lebanese capital of Beirut; the stadium was reportedly being used as a PLO ammunition depot. In response, the PLO shelled Israeli towns in Galilee. The following day, the Israeli government formally accused the PLO of violating the cease-fire and, on June 6, Israeli ground troops marched into southern Lebanon in a military campaign known as Operation Peace for the Galilee. The campaign sought to eliminate the large PLO presence in southern Lebanon and insure that Israel’s allies, the Maronite Christians, would hold power in Beirut. From mid-June to mid-August, Israel laid siege to Beirut; U.S. intervention eventually lifted the siege and PLO guerrillas were evacuated from the city.
Significantly, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon occurred without a domestic consensus; far from unilaterally supporting their government’s actions, the Israeli public was divided on the issue. Many, including Dalia Ravikovitch, did not view the operation as necessary or essential to Israel’s survival as a nation and were emboldened to speak out against the invasion. Israeli public protests became even more heated after the massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in September 1982.
The Sabra-Shatila massacres
In September 1982 violence in Lebanon erupted once again. On September 14, the Maronite leader Bashir Gemayel, newly elected president of Lebanon, showed up at a party branch office to deliver his weekly lecture. He was speaking to a Maronite women’s group when a bomb, planted by a pro-Syrian dissident, exploded, killing dozens of people, Bashir included. Shocked by the death of one of their prominent allies, the Israeli government prepared to retaliate against the Palestinians, whom they held responsible for the bombing.
The day after Bashir’s assassination, Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon and General Eitan authorized both the seizure of key junctions commanding West Beirut and the entrance of Pha-langist militiamen into the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila to search for PLO operatives. Sharon himself gave the Phalangists permission to destroy PLO installations and personnel, declaring, “I don’t want a single one of the terrorists left” (Sharon in Sachar, p. 914). Accompanied by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), about 300 to 400 Christian militiamen—most of them Phalangists, some members of the Israeli-sponsored South Lebanon Army—proceeded to the camps on September 16. Once in the vicinity, all the troops dropped out of the Israelis’ sight. However, Israeli intelligence officers watching the camps from the nearby roofs overheard fragments of radio conversation among the Christian militiamen and began to suspect that indiscriminate violence was taking place inside. Although the Israeli officers relayed their suspicions to army headquarters, it was several hours before they received a response. A directive ordered them to remove the Phalangists from the camps, but it was not until September 18, after Sharon himself visited them, that the order was carried out. Over a period of two days the Christian militiamen had massacred scores of Palestinian men, women, and children in the camps. There is contention over approximately how many were killed—Israeli intelligence estimated a total of 700 to 800 people (Morris, p. 547).
Outrage over the Sabra and Shatila massacres was vocal and widespread. Although the Israeli government insisted that the Phalangist officers had lost control of their men, it appeared that Israeli troops had done little to stop the killings, even turning back some groups of escaping refugees because of orders to block the exits (Butler in Shahid, p. 40). On September 29, some 400,000 Israelis demonstrated in Tel Aviv, demanding that those even partly to blame be punished, whereupon a commission of inquiry was established (the Kahan Commission). It became clear that various Israeli soldiers had reported the killings to their superiors. In the wake of the investigation, Ariel Sharon was forced to resign as defense minister, though he remained in the cabinet. The massacres at the camps inspired Ravikovitch’s “You Can’t Kill a Baby Twice,” one of her most overtly political poems.
AN EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT OF THE MASSACRE
One eyewitness, a Palestinian from the Haifa region who was bom and raised in the Shatila camp, offered the following account of what he saw on the first evening of the Phalangists’ attacks: “I saw a group of women and children screaming in terror and running towards us. I saw one woman trying to support her body against the shoulder of another woman. Her hand pressed agaimt her stomach and blood gushed between her fingers. Another woman screamed as she saw us: ‘They are butchering us, they are butchering us’” (al-Shaikh, p. 3). On September 20, the witness reported, “The killers had gone, but the results of their bloody work had stayed. Most of the corpses were piled up one over another or covered by the rubble of houses brought down on top of them. The dead were indistinguishable. (al-Shaikh, p. 14).
The Poems in Focus
The contents
Selected from several volumes of Ravikovitch’s poetry, spanning the years 1959 to 1986, the poems in The Window range in content from the status of women, to nature, family life, and ancient history, to war and violence. The poems related to this last issue, war and violence, were prompted by the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Along with the first issue, the status of women, it is a topic treated in the poems that are covered here.
“This Text has been suppressed due to author restrictions.”
“This Text has been suppressed due to author restrictions.”
FROM THE BEIRUT MASSACRE: THE COMPLETE KAHAN COMMISSION REPORT
“Following a quite lengthy debate, Brigadier General Yaron responded to the remarks of the participants by stating ’the mistake, as I see it, the mistake is everyone’s. The entire system showed insensitivify, I am speaking now of the military system…. On this point everyone showed insensitivity, pure and simple. Nothing else. So you start asking me, what exactly did you feel in your gut on Friday…. I did badly, I admit it. I did badly. I cannot, how is it possible that a divisional commander—and I think this applies to the Division Commander on up—how is it possible that a Division Commander is in the field and does not know that 300, 400, 500 or a thousand, I don’t know how many, are being murdered here? If he’s like that, let him go. How can such a thing be? But why didn’t he know? Why was he oblivious? That’s why he didn’t know and that’s why he didn’t stop it…. but I take myself to task…”.
(The Beirut Massacre, p. 49)
“This Text has been suppressed due to author restrictions.”
Dolls, puppets, and Israeli women
Much of Ravikovitch’s early poetry is individual and subjective, focusing on such events as her childhood, the loss of her father, and her experiences as a modern Israeli woman. This last condition is explored in two poems originally published ten years apart—“Clockwork Doll” (1959) and “The Marionette” (1969). In the two poems, which use similar imagery and language, women are presented as fragile, doll-like creatures, whose seeming autonomy masks a deeper dependency. Both poems reflect the ambiguous social and political position in which Israeli women found themselves in the first decades of statehood. Although the new nation’s Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all its citizens were equal regardless of race, religion, or sex, laws passed during the 1950s restricting women’s working hours and control over their marital status seemed to belie that proclamation.
In 1959, the same year “Clockwork Doll” was published, the Defense Service Act decreed that women would undergo a shorter period of compulsory military service than men and also exempted from military service all women who were married, pregnant, or had children. The unspoken implications of such legislation appeared to be that the most important function of an Israeli woman was still to be a wife and mother. According to one psychologist, “None of these laws encourage [d] women to take a full and equal part in Israel’s public life”; in the 1970s, “Israeli women tend[ed] to work from the time they [left] school or graduate [d] from the army until their marriage or first pregnancy, and then drop out” (Hazleton, pp. 29-30). Moreover, many women in the more affluent classes did not work at all, serving as a status symbol in Israeli society, demonstrating that the husband earned enough to support the family without help. “The wealthier of such wives may engage in volunteer activities... but most of their time is spent around the pool, at the hairdresser’s, dressing up to stroll through the shops or linger in a cafe with friends” (Hazleton, p. 30). Such a woman might easily be depicted as “a wax doll/or a porcelain marionette,” devoid of real power or purpose.
Although many Israeli women accepted their ambivalent status—that of being theoretically but not socially, economically, or professionally equal to men—a new women’s movement began to form during the 1970s. Lectures and seminars at such institutions as Haifa University raised women’s consciousness of their situation and inspired the founding of feminist groups in such cities as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The Tel Aviv group, which eventually called itself “The Israel Feminist Movement,” bore a resemblance to both the National Organization for Women in the United States and Choisir in France. Women’s centers were also set up in Haifa and Tel Aviv, and their personnel lectured in schools and on army bases and kibbutzim, although the centers did not attract many women. In 1978 the first women’s conference was held in Beer Sheba; some 150 women attended. Representatives were able to report such encouraging developments as the establishment of the first shelter for battered women (1977) and the first rape crisis intervention center (1977)—in Haifa and Tel Aviv, respectively. Feminism also infiltrated Israeli politics; in 1975 Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin appointed a committee to examine the status of Israeli women, which became the main feminist issue during the 1980s. Israeli feminists also became more active in their country’s peace movement, protesting the 1982 invasion of Lebanon by forming Women Against Occupation. During the Intifada—Palestinian uprising—of 1987, feminists organized women’s peace groups to demand both an end to the occupation and negotiation with the PLO.
Sources
Ravikovitch’s body of work draws upon many sources for inspiration, including her own experiences as an Israeli woman and a variety of religious and mythological texts. Her early poems especially integrate language, metaphors, and images from sources as diverse as the Jewish prayer book, the Bible, the Midrash, and Greek mythology. By contrast, Ravikovitch’s later poems became more public, less internal or visionary in scope, and more focused on current events, such as the Lebanon War and the escalating hostilities between Israelis and Palestinians.
As a poet, Ravikovitch has elicited comparisons with Adrienne Rich, on the basis of the formal, tightly structured poems written during her early years. In 1977 one critic, Shimon Sandback, described those early works as an exploration of “the exotic geography of the unconscious” (Sandbank in Glazer, p. 256). By 1989, however, Robert Alter, in a foreword to The Window, noted a shift “from the visionary to the quotidian” in Ravikovitch’s work, observing that her more recent poems seemed to express a “desire to achieve a kind of naked verbal engagement with what is seen as the awfulness of everyday reality” (Alter in Ravikovitch, p. xi).
Literary context—protest poetry
While the Lebanon War in 1982 served as a catalyst for the writing of protest poetry, there was already a strong tradition of both self-criticism and political poetry in Israeli letters. Among the most famous precedents are H. N. Bialik’s “In the City of Slaughter” (also in WLAIT 6: Middle Eastern Literatures and Their Times) and “Upon the Slaughter.” Both poems were written in the diaspora, in the wake of the Kishinev pogrom in 1903 Russia. While the first poem is replete with self-criticism, the poetic voice in the second poem reverberates with prophet-like anger, raging not only against the perpetrators of the horror but also against those who would seek vengeance: “Fit vengeance for the spilt blood of a child/The devil has not yet compiled...” (Bialik, p. 113). The poems were patently political in that they were connected to a concrete historical event. Ravikovitch’s poem “You Can’t Kill a Baby Twice” is a near direct descendent of Bialik’s shorter poem “Upon the Slaughter,” which expressed outrage at the death of children in the 1903 Kishinev pogrom.
In Israel, political is often narrowly defined as dealing with the security situation and relations with neighboring Arab countries and the Palestinians. Sometimes the term is connected to religious and ethnic fissures, only rarely to so-called women’s issues, which is Ravikovitch’s original concern. In any case, she is drawing not only on the modern tradition of Bialik but also on a more recent tradition of political protest poetry in Israel. In these poems, it is not unusual to encounter references to biblical stories and characters. Perhaps most prominent is the story of the akedah, the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22), which has served as a creative source to protest the sending of the younger generation to battle and even to express empathy for the Palestinians. In The Window, in keeping with her original focus on women, Ravikovitch’s “Like Rachel” turns the spotlight on a biblical matriarch and how she died, relating it to the poet’s personal present. The most powerful examples mine the past to comment on the current situation, in personal and broader terms. These commentaries are characterized by an honest self-examination and an unflinchingly critical tone.
Reviews
On its publication in 1989 The Window received mainly positive reviews. Rochelle Owens, writing for the American Book Review, deemed Ravikovitch’s poetry “unquestionable in its values for it yields a spectrum of important themes from Jewish history and contemporary events. She creates with dramatic power the poignancy of deprivation, the horror and cruel intentions and inevitabilities of war” (Owens in Riviello, p. 1496). The pertinence of these words to “Hovering at Low Altitude” and “You Can’t Kill a Baby Twice” is clear. Falling into the category of “important themes from contemporary events,” the status-of-women poems are singled out for their important themes. Elsewhere, called a “classic Israeli text,” the “Clockwork Doll” has been described as the “literary proof text of the female condition” (Feldman, p. 133). That the poems share a general tone is something observed by a third critic: “The poet’s vision is always gripping,” L. Berk observes, “however grim and terrible it often is” (Berk in Riviello, p. 1496).
—Pamela S. Loy
For More Information
The Beirut Massacre: The Complete Kahan Commission Report New York: Karz-Cohl, 1983.
Bialik, Hayyim Nahman. Selected Poems of Hayyim Nahman Bialik. Trans. Israel Efros. New York: Bloch, 1948.
Feldman, Yael S. No Room of Their Own: Gender and Nation in Israeli Women’s Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Glazer, Miriyam, ed. Dreaming the Actual: Contemporary Fiction and Poetry by Israeli Women Writers. New York: State University of New York Press, 2000.
Hazleton, Lesley. Israeli Women: The Reality Behind the Myths. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977.
Morris, Benny. Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001. New York: Vintage, 2001.
Petran, Tabitha. The Struggle Over Lebanon. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987.
Ravikovitch, Dalia. The Window: New and Selected Poems. Trans. Chana Bloch and Ariel Bloch. Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York: The Sheep Meadow Press, 1989.
Riviello, Barbara Jo, ed. Book Review Digest. New York: The H. W. Wilson Company, 1991.
Sachar, Howard M. A History of Israel from the Rise of Zionism to Our Time. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.
Shahid, Leila. “The Sabra and Shatila Massacres: Eye-Witness Reports.” Journal of Palestine Studies 32, no. 1 (autumn 2002): 36-58.
al-Shaikh, Zakaria. Sabra and Shatila 1982: Resisting the Massacre. London: PLO London Office, Information Dept., 1982.
Swirski, Barbara, and Marilyn P. Safir, eds. Calling the Equality Bluff. New York: Pergamon Press, 1991