Kaufman, Shirley 1923-

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KAUFMAN, Shirley 1923-

PERSONAL: Born June 5, 1923, in Seattle, WA; daughter of Joseph (in business) and Nellie (Freeman) Pincus; married Bernard Kaufman, Jr., 1946 (divorced, 1974); married Hillel Matthew Daleski (a professor of English), 1974; children: (first marriage) Sharon, Joan, Deborah. Education: University of California, Los Angeles, B.A. (cum laude), 1944; San Francisco State College (now University), M.A. (English), 1967. Religion: Jewish.

ADDRESSES: Home—7 Rashba St., 92264 Jerusalem, Israel; fax: 972-2-561-8669.

CAREER: Poet. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, visiting lecturer, 1974; University of Washington, Seattle, visiting professor of English, 1977; Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH, poet-in-residence, 1979, 1989, 1994; Hebrew University School for Overseas Students, Jerusalem, teaching associate, 1980, visiting professor, 1983-84; visiting writer, American University, Washington, DC, 1994, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, 1998. Participates in poetry readings throughout the United States and elsewhere.

MEMBER: Poetry Society of America, Academy of American Poets, PEN.

AWARDS, HONORS: Academy of American Poets first prize, 1964; United States Award, International Poetry Forum, 1969, for The Floor Keeps Turning; National Endowment for the Arts creative-writing grant, 1979, and translation fellowship grant, 2003; Cecil Hemley Memorial Award, Poetry Society of America, 1985; Rockefeller Foundation resident fellow in Bellagio, Italy, 1988; Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, Poetry Society of America, 1989; Shelley Memorial Award, 1991; Charity Randall Citation, International Poetry Forum, 1998.

WRITINGS:

poetry

The Floor Keeps Turning, University of Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 1970.

Gold Country, University of Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 1973.

Looking at Henry Moore's Elephant Skull Etchings in Jerusalem during the War, Unicorn Press, 1977.

From One Life to Another, University of Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 1979.

Claims: A Poem, Sheep Meadow Press (New York, NY), 1984.

Rivers of Salt, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 1993.

Mehayim Lehaim Aherim (selected poems in Hebrew), translated by Aharon Shabtai, with additional translations by Dan Miron and Dan Pagis, Bialik Press (Jerusalem, Israel), 1995.

Roots in the Air: New and Selected Poems, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 1996.

Threshold, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 2003.

Author's poetry has been translated into French and Hebrew.

other

(Translator) Abba Kovner, My Little Sister, Penguin (London, England), 1971, published with Selected Poems, 1965-1985, Oberlin University Press (Oberlin, OH), 1986.

(Translator with Ruth Adler and Nurit Orchan) Abba Kovner, A Canopy in the Desert, University of Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 1974.

(Translator) Abba Kovner, Scrolls of Fire, Beth Hatefusoth (Tel Aviv, Israel), 1978.

(Editor and translator) Amir Gilboa, The Light of Lost Suns, Persea (New York, NY), 1979.

(Translator, with Judith Herzberg) Judith Herzberg, But What: Selected Poems, Oberlin University Press (Oberlin, OH), 1988.

(Editor with Galit Hasan-Rokem and Tamar Hess, and translator with others) The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present, A Bilingual Anthology, Feminist Press (New York, NY), 1999.

(Translator, with Meir Wieseltier) Meir Wieseltier, The Flowers of Anarchy: Selected Poems, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 2003.

Work represented in numerous anthologies, including No More Masks, edited by F. Howe and E. Bass, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1973; The Pushcart Prize IV, edited by Bill Henderson, Pushcart Press (Wainscott, NY), 1979; The Longman Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, 1950-1980, edited by Stuart Friebert and David Young, Longman (New York, NY), 1983; An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Poetry based on Biblical Texts, edited by David Curzon, Jewish Publication Society (Philadelphia, PA), 1993; Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry, edited by M. and J. Gillan, Penguin (New York, NY), 1994; Telling and Remembering: A Century of American Jewish Poetry, edited by Steven Rubin, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 1997; A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, revised edition edited by Friebert, Walker, and Young, Oberlin College Press (Oberlin, OH), 1997; and Poet's Choice, selected and edited by Robert Haas, Ecco Press (New York, NY), 1998. Contributor to Atlantic, Harper's, Nation, New Yorker, and other magazines.

SIDELIGHTS: Although born and raised on the West Coast of the United States, as a result of her marriage to an Israeli in 1974, poet Shirley Kaufman has spent much of her adult life as a resident of Jerusalem. Both her adopted country and her own American and European-Jewish heritage inform much of her poetry, which includes works published in 1973's Gold Country, 1979's From One Life to Another, Roots in the Air: New and Selected Poems, a 1996 collection that spans over a quarter century of her work, and the 2003 volume, Thresholds.

While her early works are highly personal in their focus, Kaufman's more recent volumes of poetry, beginning with 1979's From One Life to Another, follow the poet's transition to life a world away in Israel. Many of these poems illustrate the minute details of the poet's adopted homeland, even such subtle changes as "the things around us / in the light / each morning," that she illuminates in "The Next Step." Roots in the Air encompasses the span of her work to date, and shows Kaufman to be "adept at revealing the human face behind politics," according to a Publishers Weekly critic. Notable among the works included in Roots in the Air is the title poem from her 1993 publication Rivers of Salt. Several poems find Kaufman facing mortality with what the Publishers Weekly critic termed "powerful restraint," as demonstrated particularly in the poem "Ganges," where the poet writes: "It is the past I look into, / but the past keeps growing."

In more recent works, such as the verses included in Threshold, Kaufman exhibits what Women's Review of Books contributor Florence Howe referred to as a "more pessimistic" tone. The critic added that "the dominant trope of division suggests that we are on the edge not of life but of death." Kaufman's focus has shifted from her former concern over her separation from the three children she left in the United States to her own mortality, to the virulent religious extremism that shadows life in the region, and to the bleakness of her own life spent in an ancient, crumbling city. "To live in Jerusalem is to feel / the weight of stones," the poet writes in "Sanctum," the final poem in Threshold.

In addition to her own creative output as a poet, Kaufman has also helped to popularize the works of a number of Israeli poets, especially Abba Kovner through her translation of many of his works in English-language volumes that include A Canopy in the Desert, Scrolls of Fire, and the collection My Little Sister, the last published by Penguin in 1971. In addition, Kaufman's work as coeditor of The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present resulted in a work that Women in Judaism critic Lois Bar-Yaacov described as "a remarkable scholarly achievement." The Defiant Muse, divided into three sections, collects poems from Biblical times, women's verses gleaned from late-antiquity rabbinic texts, and poetry by women written between the tenth century and the modern era. In the second section, particularly, the selections are comprised of works excerpted, with the help of scholars, from traditional texts that, according to Bar Yaacov, "have always been attributed to women, but which, because of the conventions of Jewish scholarship, have usually been subsumed under male authorship."