Song without Words

Born Esphir (Esther) Yoselevitch Slepyan in Kishinev (today Chişinău, Moldova), Ira Jan (also Yan or Jann) was raised in a Russified, well-off family—her father was a lawyer of some prominence—and studied art at Moscow’s Institute of the Arts, where she adopted her pen name. She continued her studies in Paris, where she met the artist Boris Schatz, who persuaded her to open an art-school in Sofia, Bulgaria. Jan moved back to Kishinev in 1899. Initially active in Russian revolutionary movement circles, she reoriented toward Zionism, apparently in the context of a love affair with the Hebrew poet Chaim Nahman Bialik, whom she met when he came to Kishinev to gather testimonies in the immediate wake of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom. Ira Jan immigrated to Palestine in 1908 and settled in Jerusalem, where she became part of the Hebraist-Zionist circle that included Rachel Yanait Ben-Zvi and her husband, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (who served as Israel’s second president). She worked as an artist at the newly founded Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts, painted scenes from Jerusalem life, and translated some of Bialik’s key works into Russian. Deported to Egypt during World War I, she returned to Palestine in 1919 to discover that most of her artwork had been stolen or destroyed; she died that same year of tuberculosis and, it is said, of depression in the face of her loss.