Verdina Shlonsky: Sketches and Recollections

Abstract

Verdina Shlonsky (1905–90) was not only an original composer and an accomplished pianist but also a prolific writer. Between 1945 and 1967, she published articles in the Hebrew press in a highly individual style, combining impressionistic sketches, cultural commentary, interviews, and memoirs. During the 1950s and 1960s, she resumed her travels and her direct engagement with European musical life, taking it upon herself to mediate between contemporary European musical culture and a comparatively conservative Israeli readership. Her articles position her as both an observer and a critic of the postwar European avant-garde, even as she experimented with avant-garde composition and participated in the postwar musical scene. Late in life, she collected and reworked her writings into a book manuscript titled Tzlaliot, translated in its entirety into English by Dorothea Shefer-Vanson in the early 1980s as Silhouettes. Both versions remained unpublished. As part of Min-Ad’s translation project, we present an excerpt from Shefer-Vanson’s translation in which Shlonsky recalls the unsettled atmosphere of Paris in the early 1930s and her encounters with musicians fleeing the Nazi regime. The accompanying introduction situates these writings within her career and traces the history of their compilation and translation.