Zelda Schneersohn Mishkovsky , widely known as Zelda, was an Israeli poet.
Background
Zelda Schneersohn (later Mishkovsky) was born in Słupsk, Poland, the daughter of Sholom Shneerson and Rachel Hen. Her father was the great-great grandson of the third Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, also known as the Tzemach Tzedek. Her mother, Rachel Hen, was a daughter of Rabbi Dovid Tzvi Chen of Chernigov and a descendant of the Sephardic dynasty of Hen-Gracian, which traces its roots to 11th century Barcelona.
Education
Zelda attended a religious school for girls in British Palestine, and then studied at the Teachers" College of the Mizrachi movement.
Career
The family settled in Jerusalem in 1926. After graduating in 1932, she moved to Tel Aviv and then to Haifa, where she taught until her return to Jerusalem in 1935. In Jerusalem, she also worked as a schoolteacher.
One of her students was Amos Klausner, later the novelist Amos Oz, who writes in his memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness that he had a schoolboy crush on her.
Years after graduation, he visited her at home (she was still living at the same address) and was deeply touched that she still remembered how he liked her lemonade. Penai (Free Time), her first collection of poetry, was published in 1967.
Her poems, highly spiritual but at same time very direct, colorful, and precise, touched the hearts of religious and secular alike. Zelda"s poetry is imbued with deep faith, free of the doubt and irony that sometimes permeates the work of other modern Hebrew poets.
Her poems reflect her abiding faith - for example in Kaasher berakhti "al hanerot - "When I said the blessing over the Shabbat candles" כאשר ברכתי על הנרות.
In 2004, a collection of Zelda"s poetry appeared in English translation: The Spectacular Difference: Selected Poems of Zelda, translated and edited by Marcia Falk (Hebrew Union College Press).