Elisheva Elli Greenbaum

http://www.haaretz.com/culture/arts-leisure/poet-and-playwright-eli...

Poet and playwright Elisheva Greenbaum dies This quote from a eulogy are the words of poet and translator Tal Nitzan Keren who spoke of Elisheva Greenbaum, who died last Thursday in her Tel Aviv home after a short and brutal illness. Hundreds attended her funeral in Jerusalem. By Vivian Eden | Jan. 3, 2005 | 12:00 AM "Elisheva wrote poetry in her own image: daring and sensuous, frank and free of defenses, exposed to the world despite its dangers and its ingratitude, unique and original but friendly and clear and, above all, rich and generous."

This quote from a eulogy are the words of poet and translator Tal Nitzan Keren who spoke of Elisheva Greenbaum, who died last Thursday in her Tel Aviv home after a short and brutal illness. Hundreds attended her funeral in Jerusalem.

Poet and playwright Elisheva Greenbaum was born in 1965 to parents who immigrated from the United States, Judith and Professor Charlie Greenbaum of the Psychology Department of the Hebrew University. She was a graduate of the Tel Aviv University theater department, the creative writing department at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (summa cum laude) and the 1997 Helicon Workshop for Young Poets.

A beloved and imaginative teacher, she taught creative drama at Seminar Hakibbutzim and in workshops for prisoners and for children with attention deficit and emotional disorders. She taught at the Helicon Arabic-Hebrew workshop, and taught and directed Matan writing workshops for high school students and leaders of poetry workshops. Her book of poetry, "The Nape of Light," which was published by Helicon in 2000, won the Prime Minister's Prize for new poets in 2002 and the Teva Prize of the Metulla Poetry Festival in 2003. Unusually for a debut volume, the edition sold out and was reprinted at the end of 2004. Her plays have been performed in Israel and abroad. "Seamstresses," which was performed at the Haifa Theater, dealt with the true story of women garment workers in Dimona who acquired and managed their factory to prevent its closure.

This past summer, Greenbaum and Nitzan Keren appeared at the Ledbury Poetry Festival in Wales. Greenbaum, who was bilingual but wrote poetry mostly in Hebrew, translated the following poem for the festival, where two performances, as well as a subsequent one in London, were sold out and left the audiences very moved.

Stranger WomanEver since I learned to tie my shoelaces,

I've been tailing the human race.

Once, I even got very close to it.

We played together. Hide and seek, tag,

bridge. All sorts of "couple" games.

We lived together in a rented apartment.

I have pictures from that time.

The trip to Jerusalem. Holding

sunset in our hands.

Those were the days.

A refrigerator was a place full of possibilities.

A child was something to give birth to.

But I had to step back

to be able to see it better.

Without realizing, I turned transparent

as a telegraph pole.

Sometimes, he passes by, the human race,

even quite close. Friday afternoons,

on the way back from the market.

Two different hands holding one basket,

tomatoes bursting with seeds.

Barely touching, sweating, there are words

I must look up in the dictionary

to understand.

Now he lives right downstairs,

the human race. Sultry murmurs

float up from the verandah.

A confusion of words. A baby crying.

I listen. I can even

smell an omelet.

And to think that once

the moon was an example

of a faraway place.

Elisheva Greenbaum