A Lamenter in Leopard-print Pants

Zeruya Shalev is a lamentational author. Like Dahlia Ravikovitch, the great poet who influenced her, she adopted the model of classical biblical lamentation and redesigned it in accordance with her worldview. But unlike Dahlia Ravikovitch, the modernist who laments in her poetry for youth that has been lost and will never return, Shalev laments, in a post-modern style, a youth that apparently never was, and is experienced in the form of a pastiche. The difference between the two is expressed in the position of the speaker or narrator. Ravikovitch maintains the structure of the biblical lament in which there is an “I” who complains before a “you” about the difficult situation of the “he,” which is made of fragments of the victim-like “I.” In Shalev’s work, on the other hand, an “epidemic of multiplicity” is apparent in the “you” as well as in the “he” and attests to a different perception of the concept of identity. The assumption of the existence of a priori subjectivity is replaced by a perception of the “I” that is a self-performance of a masked ball of personas who express an imaginary “I” only.