The poet Chava Pinchas-Cohen died last Saturday at the age of 67 after a long and serious illness.
In my eyes, Eve is the "mother" of a husband, daughters, songs, literary works and companions.
The "maternal qualities", if it is still permissible to use this essential phrase, are what sustained and spread her inner strength according to her perception.
As I got the impression, she is "the mother of all living things", not only regarding what was actually born from her, but in the sense that everything that was important to her aroused in her the feelings of motherhood.
This principle led her to an almost constant feeling of concern, a desire to educate and influence, and when necessary even to make things difficult.
She was jealous of what she identified with, but she was mainly harsh with herself in terms of value and creative demands.
The foundation of her world is of course her excellent poetry.
The personal lives of all the members of her household passed through the tunnel of her creation and appeared on the pages of books and journals with intensity and continuous discourse.
The book of poems ("Shiri Orpaa", the united kibbutz), which was published after the death of her husband Yossi, is in my opinion one of the most powerful books of contemporary Hebrew poetry.
However, her poetry included signs of motherhood and responsibility towards extra-familial layers almost as much.
This is the case with her Bulgarian origin and her fascinating preoccupation with the Balkan countries and their Jewish heritage.
This is also the case when she founded the revolutionary and vital journal "Dimui", which Kalbia fought for, for the sake of an adequate expression of the renewed Jewish culture.
Even in the establishment and management of the "Kissofim" literary festival for Jewish writers from Israel and abroad, she saw a kind of occupation as a relative whose needs must be taken care of. She fought for its existence even when the authorities and some cultural figures did not understand the importance of the move, and did not rush to help her. In these respects, Eve was A kind of cultural and literary enterprise in itself.
In my eyes, she is an example that an important creator must and deserves to be concerned not only with his own work, but also with the overall mission of his culture.
In Eve's case it is about our Jewish culture and our Hebrew language.
She was one of the main signposts in the turning of Hebrew poetry into a post-modern path precisely by staying within the Jewish road map.
Her combination between the conceptual and the intimate, between the careful and the erotic, between the simple and the complex, and between the clear and the almost narrative, made up her special way, the one that is close to heritage and at the same time transformative in words, organs and feelings.
I have known Eve's activities, literary and cultural, for decades.
I don't remember her ever being indifferent to any human or cultural discovery.
She almost always felt the need to analyze our spiritual and cultural situation in order to find what she and we should do.
Quite a few poets owe her the opportunity she gave them to express themselves without political or sectional concerns.
There were also those who, because of this complexity, found it difficult to "swallow" its uniqueness.
The miss was mainly theirs.
I had the privilege of chairing the committee that recently selected Eve as the bride for the President's Wife award for Hebrew poetry.
We chose her out of hundreds of candidates due to her important poetry.
I could not, of course, know how much more significant this would become in a few weeks.
May her soul be bundled in the bundle of life.
I loved her.
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