Shulamit Hartal

Shulamit Hartal was blessed with a multi-faceted creativity that expressed itself in sculpture, journalism, teaching and fiction. Born in Israel in 1937, in her early twenties she married Dov Hartal, (who had been her childhood sweetheart) and studied journalism at the Advanced School for Law and Economics in Tel Aviv, the institute that would become the University of Tel Aviv. Her journalistic skills were put to use when she worked for seven years at Israel’s leading daily newspaper, Haaretz, both as a journalist – with a weekly column for the youth supplement of Haaretz on art and on handicrafts –as well as reviewing new consumer products and appliances. She also worked in the archive at Haaretz. The weekly articles on crafts for youth were collected in two volumes and became the books: “Home Boutique”, “With Your Own Hands” (Karni Publications, in Hebrew). Soon after the couple spent five years in the United States, where Shulamit studied sculpture at the University of Minesota, and Dov, a chemical engineer, completed his Ph.D in Food Science and Biotechnology. On their return to Israel, Shulamit pursued further studies in sculpture at the Avni Institute in Tel Aviv. Meanwhile, the couple had three children, a boy and two girls. Both daughters both showed artistic leanings and eventually went to art school, to The Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design (Jerusalem) and The Shenkar College of Engineering and Design (Tel Aviv). Yet despite her diverse interests and talents, Shulamit Hartal’s true love remained sculpture, which provided an outlet for her tremendous creativity. She developed a method of sculpture using wire mesh, which narrows the gap between a concept and its realization in three dimensions. Terming this innovation the “Hartal Method”, Shulamit wrote a book outlining its use, Kal VeChomer (1993, available through the Tel Aviv Museum store). For over thirty years she was a much-loved and charismatic teacher of sculpture, not only deploying considerable people skills, but passing on the Hartal method to some two thousand students. From around the world, and over the course of decades, many of her students remained regularly in touch until her untimely death in November 2013. “Finding the Grain” was Hartal’s fifth book and first novel (apart from the craft books and the book on the Hartal Method, there was also a charming book for children, inspired by her grandchildren, “Curly Eyal”). The idea for Finding the Grain, (which in the original Hebrew was titled Tarnegolet Iveret, “Blind Chicken”) was sparked off when Hartal literally stumbled over a pile of psychology books at the local recycling center. Later, in what was to be the last year of her life, Hartal devoted herself to this heavily auto-biographical novel. At first she worked intensively and in the final months, feverishly. The book saw publication two weeks before she herself succumbed to cancer in November 2013, at the age of 76.