On the Poetic Historiography of Haviva Pedaya

להיסטוריוגרפיה של משוררת

Abstract

Haviva Pedaya, an outstanding poet and one of Israel’s most prominent interdisciplinary thinkers, has established a challenging historiography, which replaces conventional attitudes to “wandering” and “exile” by a new focus on the individual’s ritual performance. The act of walking becomes a bodily, as well as textual “installation”, that also serves as a poetic test stone. Furthermore, the wandering rites, disclosed by Pedaya, question the accepted borderlines between self and other, both in the history of Jews and Christians in Europe and in the more recent dynamics of Israelis and Palestinians. My reading of the historical drama, anchored in Pedaya’s poetry as well as in her cultural thinking, emphasizes the breakages by which the entire chronic can be newly interpreted: from the destruction of the second temple, through mystical writing in the 13th and 16th century, up to the rising nationality of the eighteenth century and new Hassidic models perceived in Modernism. Pedaya’s acute attentiveness to the physical aspects of the ritual, to its feminine vehicles and the poetic images which carry it, no less than to the language in which it is embedded, reveals her as the implicit subject of the history she is writing and distinguishes her own powerful outlook as a mystical poet.