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7 A Woman Alone: The Artist Ira Jan as Writer in Eretz Yisrael --- Nurit Gourin --Fateful Encounter Ira Jan was born in Kishinev, Bessarabia, in 1869 and died in Tel Aviv in 1919. Her real name was Esther Slepian but she signed all her paintings and stories with her pen name, Ira Jan. Her father , an advocate by the name of Yoselevitz, was well known in Odessa and his daughter received a general Russian education. He was active in Russian public life and his home was a center for Russian revolutionaries. It was there, according to Tamar Meroz, that Ira Jan met her husband, Dr. Slepian, "a bearded, broad shouldered giant," a fighter for peasant rights and a member of the Revolutionary Socialist Party (S.R.). Not long after their marriage, a daughter Lena was born, "who resembled her father: tall and of sturdy limbs" (Meroz, 1972:18-19,25). In the summer of 1903, Ira Jan met the national poet Haim Nahman Bialik while he was visiting Kishinev as a member of a delegation sent to inquire into the infamous pogrom perpetrated against the Jews of the city. It was love in the shadow of horror, a friendship that blossomed on the background of the pogrom, a deep affinity between the poet and an admirer, between two artists (Shamir, 1972; Sadeh, 1985). In the course of time, Ira Jan translated a number of Bialik's most important works into Russian and published them in a special edition containing a lengthy introduction on the poet and her own illustration (Shochetman, 1945:3; Govrin, 1989:393- 401). The meeting with Bialik exerted a profound influence on Ira Jan. As a result, she left her assimilated husband and decided, first to settle in Odessa where Bialik was living, and then, after he wrote to her that he planned to go to Eretz Yisrael, to go there as 165 166 N urit Govrin well. At the end of 1907, Ira Jan settled in Eretz Yisrael. Her close friend, Rachel Yanait, quotes her as saying: "I was very happy to have been in contact with our great poet- he who brought me back to my people, he who brought me back to myself' (Yanait Ben-Zvi, 1965). Behind these words lies the drama of a tormented, perplexed woman, whose life changed completely in the wake of her acquaintance with Bialik. She made all the transitions possible- from assimilationism to an active Jewish identity, from Russian culture to Hebrew culture and Zionism, from the status of married woman and mother to that of divorcee with child, from an orderly and secure existence to an uncertain life of wandering, first in Switzerland and then in Eretz Yisrael of the Second Aliyah. "The Legend of the Temple" Ira Jan settled with her daughter in Jerusalem and became associated with members of the "New Jerusalem" circle (as described by Rachel Yanait, 1962 and Gabriel Talpir, 1969:47). These people were the leaders and pacesetters of secular Jewish life in Jerusalem: She was particularly friendly with the families of Yehoshua Eisenstadt-Barzelai, Boris Schatz, Drs. Naftali and Hanna Weitz, Dr. Jacob Thon, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Rachel Yanait (later Ben-Zvi), and Hemdah Ben-Yehuda. It was this group which laid the foundations for the Hebrew Gymnasium in Jerusalem at the end of 1908, and at the beginning of the school year 19081909 , Ira J an began teaching painting and sketching there (where her daughter was also a student). Under their influence she became connected with the workers' movement and the press in Eretz Yisrael, and began to contribute to the journals of that period. Rachel Yanait and Ira Jan lived together in a house lent to the group by Boris Schatz and from that period, the letters written in Russian by Ira Jan to Rachel Yanait have been preserved (in the Ben-Zvi Archives). Yanait was in Jaffa, having been sent at doctor 's order to bathe in the sea. The letters which have at once elements of lyricism, practicality, poignancy and anger, reveal how involved Ira Jan was in the public affairs of the new Yishuv in general and of Jerusalem in particular. She was a committed woman, determined to fight for what she believed to be just, and against anything which appeared to her to be erroneous, distorted or unjust. Despite the fact that she loved the sea, she loved Jerusalem better and expresses this in one of the letters: A Woman Alone 167 You ask me...

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