This article explores the attitude of Israeli poet Dahlia Ravikovitch (1936–2005) to the Other by considering, side-by-side, one of her poems, “The Viking,” and a little known episode in her life, which though brief was, as it turns out, quite important for Ravikovitch: her voluntary work, in 1964, at the Chicago-based residential school for autis-tic children run by the famous psychologist, Bruno Bettelheim.
The poem reflects on the self’s relation to the Other from the complex perspective of simultaneous alienation and identification. This position re-produces Ravikovitch’s attitude toward Bettelheim whom she adopted as an authoritative father figure yet also rebelled against. Published in 1967, the poem “The Viking” is revealed to be in praise of difference and the aristocratic nature of trauma, anticipating Ravikovitch’s political poetry (which came to the fore after the first Lebanon War in 1982), by exposing the deep ethical commitment of her work.
The “intended misidentification” (טעות בזיהוי ) of the Other—as a Viking, in this case—is explored here as a unique poetic device used by Ravikovitch to challenge conventional categories and to protest against oppressive systems.

This article focuses on the intellectual relationship between two leading Hebrew-European poets as revealed in their recently discovered extensive correspondence. Beyond the significant biographical revelations offered by their letters – among which is Tuvia Rübner’s transition from writing in German to Hebrew – their correspondence (mainly during the years 1949–1969) sheds light on the complexities of the two poets’ position as European artists in nascent Israeli culture. It raises questions of cultural homeland and exile, of the idealization of pre-war Central-Western European culture, and of the agency of the periphery in preserving the values of a declining cultural center. Lea Goldberg and Tuvia Rübner were migrants from the relatively close periphery of German culture who sought to reconstruct something of its intellectual center in the temporally and spatially distant periphery of postwar Israel. In their literary works, the two built bridges between the two cultures at a time when contacts between them were largely considered taboo. Among other aspects, Goldberg and Rübner’s correspondence reveals their nuanced attitudes toward German culture amid the complex multicultural milieu of the State of Israel’s formative years.

The years spent in Berlin by Hebrew poet Lea Goldberg (1911–1970) on the eve of the Nazis’ rise to power were a formative period in her creative and personal life.  Nevertheless, she rarely mentions Berlin explicitly in her poetry. In this article, I argue that ekphrasis (in this case, poems on paintings) served Goldberg as she worked through her Berlin experience, as an act of transmutation, translation, interpretation, and identity-building. Poems written during her stay in Germany recently discovered in the poet’s archive shed new light on the role ekphrasis played in her poetry, on her affinity with woodcut artist Frans Masereel, and on her approach to primitivist and modernist visual arts. Ekphrasis is revealed here as a mechanism of encryption in poetry that turned Berlin in the Götterdämmerung of the Weimar Republic into the Berlin of European and Jewish enlightenment, modernism into classicism, and the male gaze into female expression.

The poems of the Hebrew woman poet Lea Goldberg (1911-1970) are usually considered as symbolist and therefore detached from their time. Goldberg's poem book Al ha-Prikha (On Blossom, 1948) serves as a test-case to identify its references to history: the Second World War, the Holocaust and the independence of the state of Israel. By discovering the different 'urtexts' of the poems — their Russian, German and Italian sources of influence — the reader can understand Goldberg's own representation of her time. For example, she tends to read WW2 through the impressions of the Russian poets Alexander Blok and Osip Mandelstam from WW1 and the Russian revolutions. The different layers of Goldberg's palimpsest also portray her inclination towards two opposite mentors: the Hebrew poet Avraham Ben-Yitzhak (Sonne), who represented to her the German symbolistic poetry ('art for art's sake'), and on the other hand, another Avraham — the Hebrew poet Avraham Shlonsky, who believed in a more engaged poetry and was an ardent follower of the dominant modernist Russian poets. The 'Palimpsestical effect' of On Blossom poems is not only retrospective but also prospective: in their turn, the poems of this book were interwoven into Israeli culture and were integrated into some popular and literary works which correspond with them.