Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky (1914–1984)

Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky, later known by the pen name Zelda, was born to a Jewish family in Chernihiv, Russian Empire (present-day Chernihiv, Ukraine). Her parents were Rachel Hen and Sholom Schneurson, a descendant of a long line of Hasidic rabbis. The family emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine in 1926, when she was 12, settling in Jerusalem. Zelda attended a religious school for girls and then studied at the Teachers' College of the Mizrachi movement. After graduating in 1932, she worked in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem. She was a painter and elementary school teacher, and wrote poetry. One of her second-grade students was Amos Klausner, later the novelist Amos Oz, who wrote in his memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness that he had a schoolboy crush on her. In 1950, she married Hayim Aryeh Mishkovsky and began to devote herself to her writing. Her first collection of poetry, Penai (Leisure Time), was published in 1967 and established her reputation in the literary world. Her six books of mystical-religious verse were bestsellers. She received the Bialik Prize for Literature in 1978. In 2004, a collection of her poetry appeared in English as The Spectacular Difference: Selected Poems of Zelda, translated and edited by Marcia Falk.