Craft: Liliane Atlan

Liliane Atlan (1932-2011) was a French-Jewish poet and playwright, but all her work defies genre distinctions and is “beyond category.” Her threads and themes connect it all, though: feminism, the Holocaust, dreams, psychology, and death.

Atlan was born Liliane Cohen in Montpellier, France; her family settled there from Salonica, Greece. She had four sisters. Atlan was seven when they went into hiding. Because they could not go to school, they performed plays in the attic. “I was the scenery, the actors, the author, and everything in that world within me cried out, gesticulated, died,” Atlan explained.

Atlan: “I was in a forest made of fine, white hands.”