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• 122 Anna Margolin The Most Important Details of Anna Margolin’s Life The complete picture of Anna Margolin will be revealed only when someone is found who will read, sort, and put into order the hundreds of letters she left behind, which fill quite a large valise. The letters are in Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew, and some also in English. Most of the letters were written to her. A great number, though, are from her to others. The letters to her are mostly from people who knew her from when she was a girl of fourteen until her early thirties. No one who wrote to her during those decades was entirely indifferent to her. Most of these people, for a longer or shorter time, were in love with her, some of them passionately . And in the case of one, that love lasted several years. The more one loved her, the more one suffered. This was especially the case in her youth, because she liked to play with those who loved her until she had hurt them. This is not to say, though, that she herself emerged whole from the game. In most such games, she was the greatest victim. Every true love that she experienced was for her a tragic love. A love affair for her was a conflagration. And she always came out singed from it. Also in the valise is a mass of letters from her family. Most of them from her mother, a few from her father, some from an aunt. There are also twenty or more from her son Na’aman Stavi, who after the founding of the State of Israel was that nation’s first military governor. Soon after Anna Margolin died, I sent him all the letters and most of her photographs of him, together with a huge crate of books in several languages. Of the last thirty years of her life, almost 90 percent of the letters are from her to me and from me to her. These letters themselves are wonderful material for Anna Margolin | 123 a future biography of Anna Margolin; they will provide the key to many of her poems, and to the tragedy and confusion of her last years, and perhaps also to the mystery of why she stopped writing poetry as suddenly as she began. Family Anna Margolin was too close to me and our lives were too intimate and too tragically intertwined for me to write about her properly. But I feel that I should point out the most important details of her life, as much as they are known to me. Because if I don’t do it, there won’t be anyone else. If, however, people are found who know something more about her or her family, and if they want to correct me or complete this endeavor, I will, of course, be happy, because every new detail will help portray her more fully. Here are the details of Anna Margolin’s life as they are known to me. Anna Margolin (Roza Lebensboym) was the only child of Menakhem and Dvoyre Leye Lebnsboym, both raised in Brisk-Dlito. This “onlyness” is surely one of the chief conditions that determined the direction of her life. Of her father’s family, Roza knew very little. Her father’s father she remembered as if from a dream. In her eyes, he was very, very old, the few times that she saw him as a child. In reality, he was not nearly as old as he seemed to her in her childhood years. She also remembered that her father held her grandfather in high esteem and told her he was brilliant. The name “Lebnsboym” tells us that her father came from a learned family. Perhaps the forebear of the family was the author of the seyfer Eyts Khaym.1 From her childhood she remembered that she was once taken to a wedding, to which the Grodner Rabbi had also come with his daughter, who embraced and kissed her as if she was one of them. Her father told her then that the Grodner Rabbi was his cousin. Her father, Menakhem 1. “Lebensboym” can be translated as “tree of life.” Here, Iceland is comparing the name to Eyts Khaym, which has the same meaning in Hebrew and is the name of a wellknown and revered Kabalistic book by Rabbi Khaym Vital (1543–1620), who was called The Eyts Khaym. (Ben Sadock) [3.15.27.232] Project MUSE (2024-04-25...

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