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Rabikovitch, Dalia (1936–2005) By Codish, Moria
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Born in Ramat Gan, Israel, Dalia Rabikovitch was six years old when her father died in a car accident. Her family moved to kibbutz Geva, a transition that Rabikovitch later recalled as traumatic. At the age of thirteen she moved to the city of Haifa, where she was transferred from one foster family to another. Orphanhood and alienation are the fundamental experiences in her poetry, which is characterized by a lyrical, elegiac tone.
Rabikovitch is a highly regarded poet in Israel. Her work combines biblical-archaic language with simple, day-to-day semantics, and ranges from abstract to concrete. She was among those who generated the poetic shifts in Hebrew literature of the 1950s and 1960s, and her voice is one of the most influential and unique in modernist Hebrew poetry.