Gali-Dana Singer facts for kids

Gali-Dana Singer (Hebrew: גלי-דנה זינגר), born on April 23, 1962, is a talented writer, artist, photographer, and translator. She was born in Saint-Petersburg, Russia. Gali-Dana studied at the Leningrad State Institute of Theatre, Music and Cinematography for three years. She then decided to leave without finishing her degree.

In 1988, she moved to Israel from her hometown, which was then called Leningrad. Before settling in Jerusalem, she lived in Riga with her husband, Nekod Singer, for three years. In Jerusalem, her writing career grew, and she became very involved in Russian and Hebrew culture.

Gali-Dana started writing poetry in Russia. However, she never joined writing groups and only shared her poems with her father and an older friend. She didn't publish her work in Russia because she was a Zionist and planned to move. She didn't want to cause trouble for potential publishers. Her artistic journey truly began in Israel. There, she started expressing herself through visual arts, photography, and illustrating books. She also expanded her poetry by writing in English and Hebrew, and by translating other literary works.

Two years after moving to Israel, Gali-Dana showed her book illustrations at children's book exhibitions. These were held at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, alongside her husband's work. Most of her career, awards, and lasting impact have been in Russian and Hebrew literature, poetry, and translations. In 1992, she published her first official book of poetry, Collection. The next year, she released another book called Adel Kil'ka. From.

Since 1993, Gali-Dana has been a member of the General Union of Writers in Israel. She is also a member of the Jerusalem Literary Club, where she leads a Poetry Seminar. From 1994 to 1995, and again since 1997, she was the editor-in-chief of two Russian literary journals, IO and Dvojetochie. She has published many literary magazines in Israel. She also edited the Russian journal Dvojetochie, which later started including Hebrew writings, making it a bilingual (two-language) journal.

In 2001, she published another Russian poetry collection called To Think: River. This was the first of her own works that she translated into Hebrew. A year later, Singer became the editor-in-chief of another Russian-Hebrew bilingual journal, Dvojetochije-Nekudataim. She also published more poetry books, including Blind Poems and Yarusarim Besieged.

Moving to a New Home

In the late 1980s, Gali-Dana and her husband found it very hard to leave the Soviet Union from Leningrad to go to Israel. So, they became Refuseniks. This meant they were people who were denied permission to emigrate by the Soviet authorities. They moved to Riga, where it was easier to leave the country.

Gali-Dana Singer has shared that Israeli life and culture were different from what she expected. However, this didn't stop her from fitting in. One of her biggest challenges was the language barrier. She found it hard to find the right words to express herself. Since moving to Israel, her goal has been to blend in and make sure her Russian and Israeli cultures work together in her new home.

Singer worked hard to integrate, even during the 1990s post-Soviet aliyah. This was a time when many people moved from the former Soviet Union to Israel. Some newcomers believed that Russian culture was better than Israeli culture. They valued art more if it came from Russia. Gali-Dana Singer felt sad about this. She said, "They accept... the supremacy of culture that they know and love. And what is more, some of the culture's consumers also feel that they are superior to Russian culture produced here." She noticed that people would attend shows from Russia but not buy tickets for Russian shows made in Israel.

Gali-Dana embraced Hebrew culture and wanted to integrate. This is why she spoke out against this idea of "cultural supremacy." She also worked to deeply understand her Jewish heritage while keeping her Russian identity. By doing this, she helped create a new culture. She doesn't see this new culture as any less important than her old one. For example, she made sure to learn Hebrew. This helped her step outside the Russian cultural group that might have kept her separate from most Israelis. She explained, "I am a poet who writes Russian and Hebrew. I live here and was born there, and both of them are important to me. I do not want to construct a huge wall to protect and define me." She believes it's important to be open to different directions in life.

Learning a New Language

Adia Mendelson-Maoz, in her book Multiculturalism in Israel: Literary Perspectives, talks about Gali-Dana's thoughts on learning a new language. Gali-Dana knows she is culturally different from most Israelis. This made her believe that Russian immigrants should go through a "cultural and lingual change" in their new environment. She also observed that we don't choose where we are born or our first language. Our first language is the foundation of how we write. So, the hard work of finding and expressing oneself with new words is both an artistic and cultural challenge.

Mendelson-Maoz uses the idea of "mother" as a comparison for "mother tongue." She shares a poem Gali-Dana wrote in English to show this: "Here you can change a word, there a wording but nothing can be rewritten as a rule. It's too late every time I try. Writing is a mother. The primary source for the dunces. You cannot change a mother or can you, can? A mouthful of hysterical giggles, a handful of coppers."

In an interview for Poetry International, Gali-Dana talked about learning Hebrew. She compared it to her experience with Russian. She said that her strong connection to language in her Russian poems helped her connect with Hebrew. She accepted the new language in the same way. She feels she is the same poet, but she writes different things in a different language. What inspires her to write is mostly the experience of language itself. She believes if she only wanted to express her personal life, she wouldn't need to write in another language.

Her love for language has driven her to master Hebrew. This has also shaped how she approaches fitting into Israeli life and culture. It has also been a key idea in her views on multiculturalism, which is about many cultures living together.

Being a Translator

Years after settling in Jerusalem, Gali-Dana started focusing on translating works between Russian and Hebrew. In her interview with Lisa Katz, Gali-Dana said that translating poems changes their original meaning. She believes a translated poem gets a new and unique life. She feels that when she translates, she is "creating something parallel." She credits this to the complex structures of Russian and Hebrew.

Gali-Dana has led workshops to create Russian and Hebrew poetry collections. She was also the editor-in-chief of the bilingual Russian and Hebrew journal Dvojetochije-Nekudataim. She has translated countless poems between these languages, and sometimes into English too. Through this work, she has made many observations about translation.

In the same interview, she explained: "I always emphasize that I haven’t switched from Russian to Hebrew, rather that I am moving back and forth from Russian to Hebrew and Hebrew to Russian." She tried to understand how this transfer happened. She realized the process started much earlier when someone tried to translate one of her poems into Hebrew. She didn't like the result and started to write it herself. She saw that it was impossible to translate it exactly as it was in the original. She realized that what works in Russian doesn't always work in Hebrew.

Mendelson-Maoz writes that Gali-Dana believes the difficulty in learning a language is not about how smart you are, but about your mindset. Singer's observations show that she sees languages as a unique and complex way of experiencing the world. This means language is more than just a school subject. Mendelson-Maoz connects Gali-Dana's artistic struggle to find new words with her disapproval of Russian cultural supremacy. This supremacy made many newcomers feel left out in Israeli society. These ideas help explain how Gali-Dana's experience with language, especially as a translator, shaped her views on multiculturalism in Israel.

Many Languages, Many Cultures

Gali-Dana Singer is highly respected in the Russian-Israeli literary community. She is praised for her approach to Hebrew and for stepping out of her language comfort zone. Ya'ara Ben David, another Israeli poet, spoke about how some Russian immigrants were unwilling to learn Hebrew. She also talked about what is needed for people to integrate into the Middle Eastern environment.

Ben David said that sticking to one's first language often comes from a psychological difficulty to accept new experiences. She believes an emotional barrier can limit a writer to their first language and culture. She praised Gali-Dana Singer for doing the opposite. Singer's sensitivity to poetic language and how she handles the challenges of Hebrew explain her wide use of wordplay and rhyme.

Gali-Dana's efforts to integrate into Israeli culture, her disapproval of Russian cultural supremacy, and her understanding of language have led to many poetry collections in English, Hebrew, and Russian. According to Maoz, her "multilingual and intellectually desirable and balanced" approach to literature and poetry supports her belief in multiculturalism. Gali-Dana promotes this idea through her artistic work. As a symbol of this ideal, Maoz included her poem Selected Poetry of the Dining Room, then. The furniture in the poem represents the different cultures that exist together in Israel. The poem asks if these cultures can truly live side-by-side.

In her interview with Lisa Katz, Gali-Dana was asked why English poetry has influenced Hebrew literature more than Russian poetry in recent decades. Gali-Dana replied that she isn't worried about English influence. She believes everything happens in its own time, and different poetic styles come and go. She feels the main drive for poetry is the language a person truly feels. She mentioned Chaim Lensky, who wrote in Hebrew even while living in St. Petersburg and in exile in Siberia. Gali-Dana believes it doesn't matter where we live or even which language we hear. Her open and welcoming views on cultural influence are clear in both her opinions and her poetry.

Works and Translations

Gali-Dana Singer's work has been featured in almost every major literary magazine in Israel. [Poetry International] also features her poem 'The one whose silence is the world'. She is also included in a University of Iowa collection of English translations of Russian-language women poets.

Some of her notable works include:

• 1992, Collection
• 1993, Adel Kil'ka. From
• 1998, Shalom Aleichem (an anthology of Israeli Poetry she translated)
• 1999, “Poets’ Dialogue” Anthology (edited with Peter Kriksunov)
• 2000, To Think: River (in Hebrew)
• 2002, Blind Poems (in Hebrew) and Yarusarim Besieged
• 2006, The Coiner of Incidents (in Hebrew)
• 2013, Two poems featured in An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets
• 2014, Translated Savely Grinberg's Beh-do-ir, Ra'anana, Even Hoshen
• 2017, Translucent (in Hebrew)
• She also wrote "I'm Not Christina Rossetti But I Also Read Tennyson, Told Cecilia in Praise of Lesser Gods" (in English).

As of 2020, she is working with American poet Stefan Ellis on a project called "Other or Some: A Collaborative Poetry Project."

In total, Gali-Dana has published seven books in Russian and four in Hebrew. She has translated many poems and has led workshops to create Russian and Hebrew poetry collections. Her own poems have been translated into English, Spanish, Yiddish, Latvian, and Georgian.

Involvement in Literary Communities

Gali-Dana has been very active in Israel's literary scene and has taken part in many events. She has attended the Poetry Festival in Metulla, a small Israeli town, three times. In 2000, she won the Teva Poetry Prize there. She has also been to the International Jerusalem Poets Festival and the Moscow International Festival of Poets.

Awards

• 1997 -- Absorption Ministry's Prize for Israeli immigrant writers
• 2000 -- Teva Poetry Prize at the Israeli Poetry Festival in Metula
• 2004 -- Prime Minister Levi Eshkol Literary Prize (Israel)