In the short history of Israeli letters, two women have loomed large: Yona Wallach and Dahlia Ravikovitch. Wallach said of Ravikovitch, “[She] doesn’t deal enough with sex. She’s not revolutionary enough. She doesn’t pay attention to how differently she writes from me. She isn’t a feminist.” What Wallach counts as vices let us call virtues. Ravikovitch had the final say with a tongue-in-cheek elegy for her rival Wallach: “Yona, shalom,/ this time I’m the one who’s talking/ and you won’t interrupt anymore./ Now, God help us, you’re in the ranks of the holy and pure./ … . you are one dead girl.”
This acid irony, coexisting with an idiosyncratic assertion of the divine, is the trademark voice that made Ravikovitch one of the most beloved and honored Israeli poets before her death in 2005. Bloch and Kronfeld are the “two Chanas” behind Open Closed Open, the acclaimed translation of Yehuda Amichai, and it is fitting that they have now taken up the task of “opening” Ravikovitch up to an English readership. Like Amichai, Ravikovitch uses the Bible: not piously, but as a scaffolding from which to build firm structures. Here the two Chanas tackle the more intricate, allusive Biblical work that Bloch omitted in previous translations of Ravikovitch. Both in the text and in the very helpful footnotes, the English reader can now sense the ductile forms and blunt wit of the poet’s Statehood Generation Hebrew (Ravikovitch, unlike Amichai, spoke