Queen Athaliah is the only woman in
the Hebrew Bible reported as having reigned as a monarch within Israel/Judah.
She is the daughter of either Omri, king of Israel (2 Kgs 8:26; 2 Chr 22:2),
or, more probably, of his son King Ahab (2 Kgs 8:18; 2 Chr 21:6;the
Jewish historian Josephus cites this in Antiquities), who ruled from 873
to 852 b.c.e. There is no evidence that she was the daughter of Ahab’s chief
wife, Jezebel. Athaliah married Jehoram (reigned 851–843 b.c.e.) of Judah (2
Kgs 8:18; 2 Chr 21:6). After Jehoram’s death, their son Ahaziah reigned
for one year, and “his mother was his counselor in doing wickedly” (2 Chr
22:3).
After
Ahaziah is killed in a dynastic struggle (2 Kings 9), Athaliah sets out
to kill the rest of the royal dynasty and seizes the throne of Judah in
Jerusalem (2 Kings 9; 2 Chr 22:10–23:21). She manages to remain sole monarch
for six years (842–836 b.c.e.). In the seventh year a revolution led by
Jehoiada the priest puts on the throne the seven-year-old Joash, Ahaziah’s
child who was rescued by his paternal aunt (and Jehoiada’s wife) Jehosheba from
the royal bloodbath six years earlier. The overthrow takes place in the
Jerusalem temple. Athaliah is killed in what she terms “treason” (2 Kgs 11:14;
2 Chr 23:13) against her reign.
The
biblical evaluation of her rule is negative. Both 2 Kings 11 and 1 Chronicles
(especially chap. 24) connect Athaliah with Baal worship, even though her name
contains the theophoric element yah[u] (yhwh), like the names of other
figures in the story. The priestly objection to her could also be motivated by
hatred for a non-Davidic ruler and, particularly, a woman ruler. However, that
she managed to sustain her reign for six years can be attributed to her
successful use of various sources of power: her royal origins and connections,
involvement in her husband’s and son’s reigns, economic independence, personal
ability, and political knowledge—all of which are not mentioned, apart from
notes on her wicked influence on her husband and son.
The noted social historian Paula E. Hyman has focused her scholarly exposition on her two primary areas of interest, the Jews of France and Jewish women. Her work as co-editor of both Jewish Women in America and Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia reflects a commitment to Jewish feminism that is both personal and academic.
A role model for many Jewish women, Hyman has shared her dedication to and vision of Judaism with her husband Dr. Stanley Rosenbaum and their two daughters, Judith (b. 1973) and Adina (b. 1976). Her profound involvement in the professional world was matched only by her commitment to family and Jewish communal affairs. A Zionist, Hyman regularly spends time in Israel, lecturing in Hebrew as well as English at the Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University and Ben-Gurion University. She has been involved in liberal political causes both in the Jewish community and in the larger American society. Never one to be stymied by adversity and difficulty, Hyman was forthright and accomplished in all that she set out to do and has made her impact in all her fields of endeavor, both personal and public.
Scholarship, feminism, dedication, perseverance and integrity immediately come to mind when Paula Hyman’s name is mentioned. Those who know her well would add family and friendship to the list. Though she has ostensibly moved only from Boston, where she was born on September 30, 1946, to her present residence in New Haven, Connecticut, Hyman has traveled wide and far, spiritually, intellectually and physically. Hyman remains steadfast in her dedication to Jewish and humanitarian commitments and to her professional and personal concerns.
The oldest of three sisters, Paula was educated in a home where Jewish culture was an essential aspect of her upbringing, and so it has remained throughout her own career. Her mother, Ida (Tatelman), the daughter of impoverished Russian immigrants, transferred her aspirations for education to her daughters while managing the household and working as a bookkeeper. Her father Sydney, the son of Lithuanian immigrants, worked as an office manager to support his family. Upon graduating from high school, Hyman studied at Radcliffe College, where she received her B.A. (summa cum laude) in 1968, having studied with a wide range of scholars in the Humanities, including two renowned mentors in Jewish history, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and Isadore Twersky. She acquired her knowledge of Hebrew and of classic Jewish texts from the Hebrew Teachers College of Boston (now Hebrew College), which she attended ten to thirteen hours a week in addition to regular high school and college.
In 1966 she gained her B. J. Ed. there. Hyman went on to Columbia University to do post-graduate work in history and completed her Ph.D. in 1975, after studying with distinguished medievalists, Gerson D. Cohen and Zvi Ankori, and prominent modern historians, Robert O. Paxton and Ismar Schorsch. Hyman‘s dissertation on the Jews in France after the Dreyfus Affair appeared with Columbia University Press under the title From Dreyfus to Vichy: The Remaking of French Jewry, 1906–1939 (1979), a work that immediately asserted her place among modern Jewish historians.
Widely acclaimed and one of the finalists for the annual National Jewish Book Award in history, From Dreyfus to Vichy treated carefully and judiciously the different strands of French Jewry, granting special attention to the inter-war period and the dramatic transformation of the Jewish community, by virtue of the extensive immigration of Eastern European Jews. While still a graduate student, she joined with two colleagues, Charlotte Baum and Sonya Michel, to publish a pioneering work on The Jewish Woman in America (1976), that gave pride of place to Hyman’s growing involvement in Jewish feminism, both on a scholarly and a personal level. In 1971 she had been one of the founders of Ezrat Nashim, a small feminist activist group that lobbied vigorously for the ordaining of women as Conservative rabbis and for equality of women in Jewish religious and communal life.
Indeed, French Jewry and Jewish feminism were to remain at the center of her intellectual and communal attention during the following decades. Her work on French Jewry in the modern period entered into new directions with the publication of The Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace. Acculturation and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (1991). Forever interested, academically and personally, in the ways in which Jews construct different forms of identity in a non-traditional society, Hyman inquired into the ways in which modernization impacted upon Jews in the Alsatian cities and countryside following emancipation. Sensitively employing the tools of a social historian, she looked at a wide range of sources to understand the behavioral patterns of “simple Jews” (e. g. peddlers, shopkeepers, cattle dealers).
She concluded that they showed a greater ability to withstand the pressures of modernization than previously maintained with regard to city Jews. In this study she was also concerned with identifying how the process of modernization impacted on the experience of Jewish women, and she successfully illuminated aspects of their ritual observance and economic involvement. Hyman’s move from the ideological problems that dominated her interest in the first book to social ones in this study attested to her ability to address a wide-range of social and cultural issues in equally professional quality. Her synthetic volume The Jews of Modern France (1998) was thus a natural outgrowth of these different interests and a product of her full command of the scholarship in modern French history and modern French Jewish history. Indeed, her perspective in this volume is grounded in her belief that French Jewish history highlights the evolution of French history while attesting to the struggle of a minority group to sustain itself in a highly centralized state system.
While pursuing these works, Hyman continued her engagement in the history of Jewish women and her efforts to integrate their experience into the Jewish historical narrative. She taught and lectured on Jewish women and after publishing Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representation of Women (1995), a book on the process of acculturation of women in America and Europe that developed from the Stroum Lectures, she undertook with Deborah Dash Moore the editing of a two-volume historical encyclopedia Jewish Women in America (1997).
The latter work, which generated much enthusiasm among scholars and received several distinguished awards, could not have come to fruition without the tremendous dedication of the editors. Following that effort, Hyman published the memoirs of Puah Rakovsky (My Life as a Radical Jewish Woman. Memoirs of a Zionist Feminist in Poland, 2002), whose life story as a committed feminist and Zionist was very close to her heart. Indeed, like Puah, Hyman could not live a life without total engagement in these areas, as in others.
Hyman was always involved and active in academic and communal affairs while she pursued her career. After serving as assistant professor of history at Columbia (1974–1981), she became dean of the Seminary College of Jewish Studies, the first woman to hold the position, and associate professor of History at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (1981–1986). In 1986 she became the Lucy Moses Professor of Modern Jewish History at Yale University, where she served for over a decade as chair of Jewish Studies. Deeply committed to the advancement of Jewish studies, she has directed a large number of doctoral dissertations and has given herself unstintingly to a wide range of professional associations, bringing to all of them unfailing energy, exceptional insight and unique dedication. In recognition of her contribution to Jewish scholarship and her leadership role, in 2004 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Historical Studies from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture and was elected President of the American Academy for Jewish Research.
She has served as an active member of various editorial boards of leading research journals (e. g. YIVO Annual, Jewish Social Studies, AJS Review, Journal for the Feminist Study of Religion) and, with Deborah Dash Moore, has for over two decades edited Indiana University Press’s series on The Modern Jewish Experience. She has been awarded many distinguished prizes and awards, including honorary degrees from the Hebrew Union College (2002) and The Jewish Theological Seminary of America (2000). Her most recent work has been as co-editor, with Dalia Ofer, of Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.
Lina Abarbanell was born on January 3, 1879, in Berlin, Germany, to Paul and Marie Abarbanell. A descendant of an eminent Sephardi family, Paul Abarbanell was a leading theater conductor. His daughter first sang in public at the age of seven. She later received both dramatic and vocal training, and appeared in numerous civic theaters in Germany. At fifteen, Abarbanell made her debut with the Berlin Court Opera, where she sang the role of Adele in Die Fledermaus over a hundred times. She performed all over Europe and gave command recitals before Austrian, Bavarian, and Persian royalty.
Though she sang but one season and one role at New York’s Metropolitan Opera—Hänsel, in the company’s first staging of Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel (premiere: November 25, 1905)—Lina Abarbanell’s place in American opera was secured when Leonard Bernstein dropped her name in the scat chorus of his one-act Trouble in Tahiti. This opera is dedicated to fellow composer and mentor Marc Blitzstein, who had married Abarbanell’s daughter Eva in 1933. After becoming the best-known exponent of Viennese operetta style in America, Abarbanell made an effective transition to American theater, contributing to it every talent for which her thorough European training had prepared her.
Her success lay in lighter musical fare and operetta. Composers such as Oscar Straus, Franz Lehár, and Edmund Eysler wrote for her expressive soubrette voice. She made about twenty recordings in 1903 and 1904, only four of which appear to have survived. In 1905, Heinrich Conried, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, invited her to sing the role of Hänsel and to perform at his Irving Place Theater, where she delighted his German-speaking audiences.
After that season, Abarbanell and her husband, journalist Eduard Goldbeck, settled in America with their daughter Eva (b. 1901). For a time she flirted with Christian Science; from a Jewish point of view she can be considered totally assimilated.
She toured the country for almost thirty years, singing her way though frothy Viennese-inspired confections such as The Geisha, Madame Sherry, The Red Canary, The Silver Swan, Flora Bella, The Grand Duke, Enter Madame, and The Student Prince. Sheet music publishers placed her photograph on the covers of numbers such as “Every Little Movement Has a Meaning All Its Own,” which she had popularized. Her greatest triumph came in the role of Hanna in Lehár’s The Merry Widow, which she played for weeks on end, the press doting on her at every turn.
Abarbanell stopped singing in 1934 after the death of her husband, but she did not leave the theater. She became a well-known casting director, Broadway producer, and occasional director, for years as partner to Dwight Deere Wiman. Among the shows she cast were I Married an Angel, Street Scene, the famous Porgy and Bess that toured the world in the early 1950s, and the film version of Carmen Jones.
Marc Blitzstein and Abarbanell remained close friends long after Eva, Blitzstein’s wife and Abarbanell’s daughter, died in 1936. Abarbanell cast Blitzstein’s opera Regina in 1949 and his musical Juno in 1959, when she had already passed the age of eighty.
Lina Abarbanell continued working in the theater almost until the day she died, on January 6, 1963. Thus a sweet singing nightingale went silenced
“Believe me I no longer have the strength to suffer and it would be better for me to kill myself than to be tortured under their bloodied hands…if we do not remember, you should [illegible]. As heroes we died and did not confess. … I aspired for my people and for my people’s well-being, and if my people is base—so be it.”
These fragments from the 1917 suicide note of Sarah Aaronsohn, nationalist activist, coordinator and later local leader of the Jewish pro-British underground “Nili” (established to liberate Palestine from Ottoman rule), represent a new interpretation of the role of women within the national project of resettlement and regeneration in Palestine after 1881.
The semi-military role Sarah carved for herself in the underground, her activity and her voluntary death made her an icon and a model of a new “Hebrew” femininity, a model especially cultivated within the so-called civic sector of the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine (defined as distinct from the socialist labor sector, dominant throughout the period before the late 1970s).
Sarah Aaronsohn was born on January 5, 1890, in the agricultural colony (moshavah) of Zikhron Ya’akov on Mount Carmel, the fifth of six children and older daughter of Efraim Fischel (1849–1939) and Malka (née Glatzano) of Baku, Romania. Her father, a prosperous grain-merchant, fell under the influence of Hovevei Zion, joining its first group of settlers together with his family, setting out from Galatz in Romania in 1882 to purchase and inhabit lands in Arab Zemerin and found the new colony of Zikhron.
The Aaronsohns became one of the colony’s most prominent families, not least because of the career and reputation of Aaron (1876–1919), Sarah’s eldest brother and mentor, a world-famous agronomist and botanist. Sarah and her siblings belonged to and characterized the second generation of the First Aliyah (1881–1904), the native-born and Hebrew speaking youth in agricultural settlements (moshavot) based on privately owned property and organized around a family economy.
The native generation fashioned themselves as a new “Hebrew” elite, establishing a plethora of youth organizations aimed at the revival of Hebrew and of a national culture, as well as clandestine semi-military organizations whose aim was the defense of Jewish property and honor, notably the Gideonim (after the biblical Gideon), founded in Zikhron in 1913 by Sarah’s brother Alexander (1888–1948).
The evolving civic elite posited itself against the Zionist labor-oriented leadership in Palestine, developing a distinct anti-socialist agenda and a nationalist activism, especially after the outbreak of World War I. The social networks which they and their leaders forged were buttressed by family relations and networks.
The social-familial network which sustained Sarah throughout her youth and adulthood included the older Aaron Aaronsohn and the younger Aaronsohn siblings, the charismatic Avshalom Feinberg of Haderah (1889–1916), described as “the first native-born man,” with whom Sarah most probably had a love relationship and who later co-founded Nili; his younger sister Zila (1894–1988), and the Belkind brothers, Eitan (1897–1979) and Na’aman (1889–1917) of Rishon le-Zion. Sarah and other members of her milieu used a familial vocabulary to describe these relations, referring to themselves as siblings and to the nation as a family of brothers and sisters, thus ignoring their elders and parents.
Elite women of the native generation forged their own nationalist language, set of mannerisms, dress and forms of social conduct which created a place for them within the Zionist project, a place which was not necessarily maternal and which was non-domestic.
Sarah herself never completed her formal education. However, encouraged by her brother Aaron, she studied languages and was fluent in Hebrew, Yiddish, Turkish and French, had reasonable command of Arabic and taught herself English. She was also apprenticed in agronomy and botany, often accompanying Aaron on his travels through Palestine, collecting flora, minerals and soils for his accumulating collection, cataloging it and supervising the experimental agricultural station and farm which he established in Atlit, near Zikhron, with the support of American Jewish leaders such as Henrietta Szold.
Like other women in her native milieu, Sarah became an accomplished rider and shot, conducting an active outdoor life. Traveling through the land developed her sense of territoriality, so central to the make-up of the national identity of the native Hebrews and their notion of activism. In the spring of 1914, probably following the rift between herself and Feinberg and his engagement to her younger and less dynamic sister Rivkah (1890–1981), Sarah married the affluent and older Bulgarian merchant, Chaim Abraham (n.d.–1954), and followed him to Istanbul. The marriage quickly foundered both because of a lack of shared interests and due to the impact of world and regional events on the couple’s private life.
The outbreak of World War I, Turkey’s joining of the Central Powers (Germany and Austria) in the autumn of 1914 and declaration of war on the Allied Powers, propelled the men and women in the Aaronsohns’ milieu to embark upon a route of action designed to benefit from the war by aiding the British to oust the Turks from Palestine.
They thought that a new order in the Middle East, under the rule of Great Britain in place of a corrupt Turkey, would help achieve degrees of autonomy for Jews in Palestine. Following a short period of cooperation with the Turkish authorities, which came to an end in mid-1915, Aaron Aaronsohn and Feinberg decided on an active anti-Ottoman policy and established an espionage network, Nili (an acronym for Nezah Israel lo yeshaker, “The Glory of Israel does not deceive,” 1 Samuel 15: 29), known to British intelligence as “A Organization.” Nili developed into the largest pro-British espionage network in the Middle East.
Upon her return from Istanbul to Zikhron in November 1915 Sarah joined the underground. From at least the end of 1916 until her capture and death in October 1917 she coordinated and virtually conducted its activities in Palestine and the Lebanon area, handling Nili’s core of about forty agents, its larger circle of supporters and informers and the organization’s finances. She decoded and sifted information, encoded it and communicated with British intelligence headquarters in Cairo, making contact from the Atlit station with the British warship Managam.
She also supervised the transmission by Nili of Jewish American money converted to gold to aid the Jewish population, which was suffering destitution, hunger and dislocation. In addition she liaised with the Turkish authorities (who were unaware of the underground until late 1917), the increasingly hostile community of her native colony and the formal leadership of the Yishuv which distanced itself from the organization. Though Hebrew sources compiled during the aftermath of the war present her leadership as familial, drawing on her position as the sister of the powerful Aaron Aaronsohn, British and Turkish intelligence sources never regarded her as a strong man’s aid and proxy.
She alone of Nili’s top hierarchy stayed on in Palestine (Aaron traveling between Europe and Cairo and Feinberg having disappeared in 1916, in an aborted expedition to Egypt). She refused the advice of British intelligence to leave Palestine by sea to save herself, remained in Zikhron after Turkish intelligence uncovered Nili’s activities, dispersed the network and was arrested on October 1, 1917. During rigorous interrogation and torture she did not disclose any information. Having learnt that she would be transferred to Damascus prison and fearing she would break down, Sarah committed suicide, using a pistol hidden in the washroom in a wing in her parental home which Aaron occupied. She lay dying for nearly four days before expiring on October 10, 1917.
Her correspondence with her siblings and with other members of Nili reveal her independent thought and refusal to adopt prescribed roles for women. She cross-dressed, occasionally referred to herself in the male gender and admonished underground members for their attempt to idealize her as a female saint. Her pre-meditated and staged suicide constitutes the first example of a secular, active death of a Jewish-Zionist woman for the nation, unprecedented in both religious martyrdom and in the Zionist tradition established in Palestine.
In the latter, women were excluded from full participation in the nation in its ultimate manifestation: a violent sacrificial death, buying the land in blood. Following her death, Sarah became the center of a cult of commemoration. Annual pilgrimages to her tomb in Zikhron’s cemetery started in 1935. The cult, idealizing her as the “hero of Nili” (rather than its heroine), elevated Sarah to a symbol of an activist nationalism and initially blurred her femininity, representing her as a soldier-saint.
She was routinely described as a Jewish Joan of Arc. The analogue with the virgin peasant of Lorraine, liberator of France from foreign rule and burnt by the English in 1431, struck a chord in the same milieu from which Sarah herself emerged: the civic circles. Her myth was also adopted by the Jewish Right in Palestine, serving as a counter, or opposing myth, to that of Yosef Trumpeldor (1880–1920), the “Hero of Tel Hai.” The legend of Sarah proved exceptionally resilient. After the Six Day War of 1967 she and Nili were incorporated in the central state-sponsored cult of heroism, officially recognized by Labor and perpetuated in children’s literature.
In the radio series This I Believe, Gerty Cori, the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel prize, which she shared with her husband and lifelong collaborator, Carl Cori (1896–1984) in 1947, stated, “Honesty, which stands mostly for intellectual integrity, courage and kindness are still the virtues I admire, though with advancing years the emphasis has been slightly shifted and kindness seem more important to me than in my youth. The love for and dedication to one’s work seem to me to be the basis for happiness.”
Gerty’s interest in studying medicine was sparked by her maternal uncle, a professor of pediatrics. Born on August 15,1896 in Prague (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) to an upper middle class Jewish family, Gerty was the oldest of three daughters of Otto Radnitz, a chemist who was a manager of sugar refineries, and Martha Neustadt. Initially tutored at home and then graduating from a girls’ finishing school, Gerty was ill-prepared to study medicine.
At the age of eighteen, after making up her academic deficiencies in two years of concentrated study at a gymnasium, she successfully matriculated at the medical school of the German University in Prague. In her first year at medical school she became a constant companion of fellow student Carl Cori, with whom she shared many interests, love of the outdoors and fascination with basic scientific research. While students, Gerty and Carl published their first joint research paper on immune bodies in disease and thus began a most productive collaboration. World War I interrupted their medical education; Carl was drafted into the Austrian army in 1916, while Gerty spent the next two years as an assistant at the medical school, doing routine work.
Resuming their medical studies after the war, they received their medical degrees in 1920 and married, in spite of the opposition of his family, who were convinced that her Jewish background would hamper Carl’s career. Though Gerty converted to Catholicism, she was unsuccessful in assuaging their fears.
Turning to research careers, they found positions in Vienna, Gerty at the Karolinen Children’s Hospital and Carl at the University of Vienna. Both managed to do research with minimal facilities. Carl moved on to the University of Graz, but Gerty, unable to obtain a position there, remained in Vienna. Their decision to leave Europe was fueled primarily by rampant antisemitism. Fortunately Carl was offered a position as a biochemist at the State Institute for the Study of Malignant Disease in Buffalo, New York, which he accepted with alacrity. Gerty followed six months later when an assistant pathologist position became available there. They never regretted their decision to emigrate. Enthusiastically embracing American culture, they became United States citizens in 1928.
Their research focused on carbohydrate metabolism and the bulk of their eighty publications between 1922 and 1931 were joint. With a couple interacting so intimately, it is difficult to divide credit between them and no attempt will be made to do so. The question they addressed was what regulates blood sugar levels. Balance experiments on glucose metabolism in rats demonstrated that the breakdown of muscle glycogen as modulated by insulin and epinephrine, led to formation of blood lactic acid which then forms glycogen in the liver.
The liver in turn releases glucose to the blood, which transports it to the muscle where glycogen is reformed. Their formulation of the Cori cycle of glycogen metabolism answered the question they had posed. Their success resulted from their development of precise analytical methods for the determination of glucose, glycogen, lactic acid, inorganic and organic phosphates—a strength and hallmark of all their future work.
In 1931, after refusing a position at a university which would prohibit Gerty from working with him, Carl accepted the chairmanship of the Pharmacology Department at Washington University in St. Louis, where Gerty was given a research assistantship at a nominal salary. Their research on glycogenolysis flourished. In 1936, extending their quantitative analytical methods to hexose monophosphates in glycogenolysis, they discovered a new intermediate, glucose-1-phosphate, the Cori ester. That same year Gerty gave birth to their only child, Thomas Carl, an event which did not change her dedication to her work.
The Coris launched a full-fledged effort in enzymology, concentrating on phosphorylase, the enzyme which converts glycogen to glucose-1-phosphate. The formation of glycogen in the reverse reaction was the first demonstration of synthesis of a macromolecule in a test tube, contradicting concepts then current. Reporting two forms of phosphorylase and their interrelationships, the Coris foreshadowed regulation by protein phosphorylation, now known to be a major regulatory mechanism of numerous cellular processes.
Recognition by the Nobel committee in Physiology or Medicine followed, citing “their discovery of the course of the catalytic conversion of glycogen.” The award was shared with Bernardo Houssay. Unfortunately 1947 was also the year when Gerty was diagnosed with myelosclerosis, a debilitating bone marrow disease. Nevertheless, her dedication to science continued unabated.
In 1946 Carl was appointed chairman of Biochemistry at Washington University and Gerty was promoted to associate professor. Shortly before receiving the Nobel Prize, she reached the top of the academic ladder, full professorship. Scientists from all over the world flocked to this Mecca of enzymology to work with the Coris. Among those mentored by them, six subsequently received the Nobel prize.
In the last decade of her life Gerty continued to do groundbreaking research. She discovered the branching and debranching enzymes which catalyze the formation and breakdown, respectively, of branch points in glycogen. In her last research project, Gerty identified the individual enzyme defect in various forms of inherited glycogen-storage diseases in children, establishing for the first time that the lack or impairment of a single enzyme activity could cause a disease.
Among the many honors which Gerty Cori received were: American Chemical Society: Midwest Award and Garvan Medal; National Academy of Sciences: Sugar Research Prize; Borden Award: Association of Medical Colleges; Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. She was also elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
On October 26,1957, at age sixty-one, Gerty Cori succumbed to her illness. It was difficult to accept that this vivacious, outgoing person with her quick, sharp mind and her passionate love of science—an inspiration to all who spent time in the Cori lab—was gone.
Kay Ryanwas born in 1945 in San Jose, Calif., and grew up in the San JoaquinValley and the Mojave Desert. Her father was an oil well driller and sometime-prospector. She received both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles. Since 1971, Ryan has lived in MarinCounty. Her partner of 30 years is Carol Adair.
For more than 30 years, Ryan limited her professional responsibilities to the part-time teaching of remedial English at the College of Marin in Kentfield, Calif., thus leaving much of her life free for "a lot of mountain bike riding plus the idle maunderings poets feed upon." She said at one point that she has never taken a creative writing class, and in a 2004 interview in The Christian Science Monitor, she noted, "I have tried to live very quietly, so I could be happy."
In her poems Ryan enjoys re-examining the beauty of everyday phrases and mining the cracks in common human experience. Unlike many poets writing today, she seldom writes in the first person. She has said, "I don’t use ‘I’ because the personal is too hot and sticky for me to work with. I like the cooling properties of the impersonal." In her poem "Hide and Seek," for instance, she describes the feelings of the person hiding without ever saying, "I am hiding":
It’s hard not
to jump out
instead of
waiting to be
found. It’s
hard to be
alone so long
and then hear
someone come
around. It’s
like some form
of skin’s developed
in the air
that, rather
than have torn,
you tear.
She describes poetry as an intensely personal experience for both the writer and the reader: "Poems are transmissions from the depths of whoever wrote them to the depths of the reader. To a greater extent than with any other kind of reading, the reader of a poem is making that poem, is inhabiting those words in the most personal sort of way. That doesn’t mean that you read a poem and make it whatever you want it to be, but that it’s operating so deeply in you, that it is the most special kind of reading."
Ryan’s poems are characterized by the deft use of unusual kinds of slant and internal rhyming–which she has referred to as "recombinant rhyme"–in combination with strong, exact rhymes and even puns.
The poems are peppered with wit and philosophical questioning and rely on short lines, often no more than two to three words each. She has said of her ascetic preferences, "An almost empty suitcase–that’s what I want my poems to be. A few things. The reader starts taking them out, but they keep multiplying." Because her craft is both exacting and playfully elastic, it is possible for both readers who like formal poems and readers who like free verse to find her work rewarding.
John Barr, president of The Poetry Foundation, said: "Halfway into a Ryan poem, one is ready for either a joke or a profundity; typically it ends in both. Before we know it the poem arrives at some unexpected, deep insight that likely will alter forever the way we see that thing."
Ryan has written six books of poetry, plus a limited edition artist’s book, along with a number of essays. Her books are: "Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends" (1983), "Strangely Marked Metal" (Copper Beech, 1985), "Flamingo Watching" (Copper Beech, 1994), "Elephant Rocks" (Grove Press,1996), "Say Uncle" (Grove Press, 2000), "Believe It or Not!" (2002, JungleGarden Press, edition of 125 copies), and "The Niagara River" (Grove Press, 2005).
Her awards include the Gold Medal for poetry, 2005, from the San Francisco Commonwealth Club; the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from The Poetry Foundation in 2004; a Guggenheim fellowship the same year; a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship as well as the Maurice English Poetry Award in 2001; the Union League Poetry Prize in 2000; and an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award in 1995. She has won four Pushcart Prizes and has been selected four different years for the annual volumes of the Best American Poetry. Her poems have been widely reprinted and internationally anthologized. Since 2006, she has been a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Ryan's "Mirage Oases" is one of the six poems that McClatchy selected:
Mirage Oases
First among places
susceptible to trespass
are mirage oases
whose graduated pools
and shaded grasses, palms
and speckled fishes give
before the lightest pressure
and are wrecked.
For they live
only in the kingdom
of suspended wishes,
thrive only at our pleasure
checked.
—Kay Ryan, 1997
Ryan and the short poem
Ryan's poems are often quite short. In one of the first essays on Ryan, Dana Gioia, wrote about this aspect of her poetry. "Ryan reminds us of the suggestive power of poetry–how it elicits and rewards the reader’s intellect, imagination, and emotions. I like to think that Ryan’s magnificently compressed poetry – along with the emergence of other new masters of the short poem like Timothy Murphy and H.L.Hix and the veteran maestri like Ted Kooser and Dick Davis– signals a return to concision and intensity." Gioia illustrated his essay with Ryan's poem, "Paired Things":
Paired Things
Who, who had only seen wings,
could extrapolate the
skinny sticks of things
birds use for land,
the backward way they bend,
the silly way they stand?
And who, only studying
birdtracks in the sand,
could think those little forks
had decamped on the wind?
So many paired things seem odd.
Who ever would have dreamed
the broad winged raven of despair
would quit the air and go
bandylegged upon the ground,
a common crow?
—Kay Ryan, 1997
Influences and affinities
Many reviewers have noted an affinity between Ryan's poetry and Marianne Moore's. Charlotte Muse suggests a comparative reading of "Mirage Oases" and Moore's "By Disposition of Angels
By Disposition of Angels
Messengers much like ourselves? Explain it.
Steadfastness the darkness makes explicit?
Something heard most clearly when not near it?
Above particularities,
These unparticularities praise cannot violate.
One has seen, in such steadiness undeflected,
How by darkness a star is perfected.
Star that does not ask me if I see it?
Fir that would not wish me to uproot it?
Speech that does not ask me if I hear it?
Mysteries expound mysteries.
Steadier than steady, star dazzling me, live and elate,
no need to say, how like some we have known; too like her,
too like him, and a-quiver forever.
—Marianne Moore, 1945
Lightness and seriousness
Ryan's "wit", "quirkiness", and "slyness" are often noted by reviewers of her poetry, but Jack Foley emphasizes her essential seriousness. In his review of Say Uncle he writes, "There is, in short, far more darkness than "light" in this brilliant, limited volume. Kay Ryan is a serious poet writing serious poems, and she resides on a serious planet (a word she rhymes with "had it"). Ryan can certainly be funny, but it is rarely without a sting."Some of these disjoint qualities in her work are illustrated by her poem "Outsider Art", which Harold Bloom selected for the anthology The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997
