Tirtsa Atar was a poet, playwright, actor, and translator. The daughter of poet Natan Alterman and actress Rachel Marcus, Atar was born in Tel Aviv. She wrote five books of poetry, plays, and works for children, and also acted on the Israeli stage and translated dozens of plays into Hebrew, including Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1976). In 1973, Atar was awarded the Zeev Award for children’s and young adults’ literature.
Now in the suburbs and the falling light
I followed him, and now down sandy road
Whiter than bone-dust, through the sweet
Curdle of fields, where the plums
Dropped with their load of ripeness, one by…
All those things whose names I hushed
in secret, I meet in the night’s abyss.
I face the dark. Alert, remembering. Silently,
again I’ll let you in—my friends, my beloved dead.
And here you are as…
Like other sculptures created by Yigael Tumarkin, the Jordan Valley Memorial Monument, erected to commemorate hundreds of Israeli soldiers who died fighting terrorists in the years immediately…