Shirley Kaufman
Current City, State, Country
Birth City, State, Country
Biography
Shirley Kaufman was an American Israeli poet and translator. Born to a Polish family in Seattle, Washington, Kaufman began writing poetry at the age of seven. Prior to her writing career, Kaufman raised three daughters and worked in advertising. She later received her Masters in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, subsequently publishing the poetry collection The Floor Keeps Turning (1970). Kaufman studied Hebrew at SFSU, frequently visiting Israel and initiating a correspondence with partisan leader and poet Abba Kovner. Their friendship developed into a professional partnership, with Kaufman translating Kovner’s writing until his death in 1987. Kaufman relocated to Jerusalem and married Hillel Daleski in 1973, beginning her career as an American-Israeli poet and continuing her translation of Hebrew and Dutch authors’ work. As Kaufman’s profile on the Poetry Foundation clarifies, this move to Israel, “where she experienced war firsthand and witnessed its aftermath, profoundly influenced her work.” Her writing illustrates themes of cultural identity, motherhood, violence, and love.
Kaufman was a prolific writer whose works were published internationally. She has been lauded with the Israeli President’s Prize for Literature, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, and a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship. She died in 2016 at the age of 93.
Sources:
“A Conversation: Shirley Kaufman & Eve Grubin.” Poetry Society of America: Crossroads, 2004. Accessed via https://poetrysociety.org/poems-essays/interviews/a-conversation-shirley-kaufman-eve-grubin.
“Shirley Kaufman.” Poetry Foundation. 2016. Accessed via https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/shirley-kaufman#tab-poems.
What is the relationship between Judaism and/or Jewish culture and your poetry?
“When I published Claims, my first book about living in Israel, I was searching for roots. Trying to meet claims from many directions—America and Israel, public and private, family and self. The book had to do with my sense of hyphenation as an American-Israeli and my grandparent’s dislocation in Seattle when they came from Eastern Europe with their Yiddish language. It took ten years (and the help of Stanley Kunitz) for me to make a book out of it. I wrote: “Home we keep saying / as if there’s a refuge / nothing can change.” But places change, and so do the people in them…
There are an increasing number of poems of witness and vulnerability in my work of recent years, poems of the wandering of the Jew, and of the endless violence and suffering in the world and here among Palestinians and Israelis. I know how precarious our lives are.”
Source:
“A Conversation: Shirley Kaufman & Eve Grubin.” Poetry Society of America: Crossroads, 2004. Accessed via https://poetrysociety.org/poems-essays/interviews/a-conversation-shirley-kaufman-eve-grubin.
Published Works
Poetry
Ezekiel’s Wheels (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2009)
Threshold (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2003)
Roots in the Air: New and Selected Poems (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1996)
Rivers of Salt (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1993)
Bread and Water (Boston, Massachusetts: Ploughshares Literary Journal, 1990)
The Temples of Khajuraho (Boston, Massachusetts: Ploughshares Literary Journal,1988)
Claims (New York, New York: The Sheep Meadow Press, 1984)
The Way to Moriah (Boston, Massachusetts: Ploughshares Literary Journal, 1984)
Learning Distrust (Boston, Massachusetts: Ploughshares Literary Journal, 1984)
After the Wars (Boston, Massachusetts: Ploughshares Literary Journal, 1984)
Pots and Pans (Boston, Massachusetts: Ploughshares Literary Journal, 1984)
What Wrong Is (Boston, Massachusetts: Ploughshares Literary Journal, 1984)
From One Life to Another (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979)
Looking at Henry Moore’s Elephant Skull Etchings in Jerusalem During the War (Greensboro, North Carolina: Unicorn Press, 1977)
Gold Country (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973)
The Floor Keeps Turning (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970)
Translations
Hebrew to English:
Meir Wieselteir. The Flowers of Anarchy: Selected Poems (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2003)
Abba Kovner. My Little Sister and Selected Poems (Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin College Press, 1986)
Amir Gilboa. The Light of Lost Suns (New York, New York: Persea Books, 1979)
Abba Kovner. Scrolls of Fire (Jerusalem, Israel: Keter Publishing House, 1978)
Abba Kovner. A Canopy in the Desert (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973)
Dutch to English:
Judith Herzberg. But What: Selected Poems of Judith Herzberg (Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin College Press, 1988)
Anthologies
The Defiant Muse: Hebrew feminist poems from antiquity to the present: a bilingual anthology (New York, New York: Feminist Press, 1999)
Author Site
Links to Sample Works
Education
San Francisco State University, M.A.
University of California, Los Angeles, B.A.