Yudit Shahar

On the other hand, car production in the 1940s probably offered more satisfaction than the minimum wage telephone/computer jobs that Yudit Shahar found when she entered the labor market as a newly divorced mother of two in 1999. Israeli poet Yakir Ben-Moshe has said about her poetic language in a review that it “moves over the surface of reality without stopping and without digging down too deep into the psychology of the self. It’s no accident that the best poems in the book are about society; in them she cries out against the injustices perpetrated against the lower socio-economic class in Israel”. In an interview with Nir Nader for Challenge, Shahar discusses her overtly social-political poetry, how she managed after suffering many indignities to find her way to the profession of teaching, and to “a God who falls silent about the cost of bread”.

Yudit Shahar, a special education teacher and the mother of two children, was born on the outskirts of  the Hatikva neighborhood of Tel Aviv and lives in Petah Tikva – tikva meaning "hope" in Hebrew, "a very significant word in my life story", the poet says:

I studied history at Tel Aviv University and Special Education at the Kibbutz Teachers’ Seminary, and teach and work with marginalized populations in Israel society. Since the age of 7, I’ve been writing poetry. My poems, primarily of a social and political nature, have been published in journals, anthologies and in newspapers.

Her first book, It’s Me Speaking (Babel, 2009), was published when she was fifty; it won the Teva Poetry Prize, the David Levitan Prize and received support from the Casset Foundation. Her second, Every Street Has Its Own Madwoman (Keshev, 2013), won the Israeli Prime Minister’s Prize for Hebrew Literature, and her third, Holy Illusion, will appear in 2021 from Afik Books. Links (in English)
Translations by Aviya Kushner
with Hebrew originals
Ilanot Review
Exchanges
Waxwing
English only
Arkansas International
Catamaran
Tupelo Quarterly
Translation and commentary by Vivian Eden
Haaretz

Podcast (in English)
TLV

Videos (in Hebrew)
The poet on her lockdown
The poet reads for Festival Ashdod
A Guerilla Culture reading in Tel Aviv



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[updated Novermber 26, 2020]