A History of Private Life

Talmudic Intertextuality in Dahlia Ravikovitch’s A Day of Burial

Abstract

This article analyzes a short story by Dahlia Ravikovitch, A Day of Burial (published in 1963), which prominently features a Talmudic text as a substratum of the plot and of the narrator’s stream of consciousness. Ravikovitch uses the Talmudic text (as well as an array of related intertexts) to both create and give meaning to the narrated world and the events that take place in it. The Talmudic text in the story operates on three levels: as a direct quotation from the Talmudic source itself; as the basis for an independent and imaginative re-telling of the events described in the text; and as a continuous allusion through which real and imagined events in the story gain significance. Thus, the story as a whole functions as a “midrash” of sorts for the Talmudic text, which simultaneously subsumes it and subverts it. While Ravikovitch is not versed in rabbinic literature in the same way other Modem Hebrew authors are, that is to say, through traditional Jewish settings of intensive learning, the article demonstrates the creative potential of an eclectic and non-traditional engagement with the Talmudic text. In Ravikovitch’s story, the Talmud is framed as foreign and distant, but also as a powerful and evocative text whose unique language and dramatic content can activate one’s poetic imagination in unpredictable ways.