Ruth Feldman, Poet, Translator Of Italian Literature, 91

[DGH]

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Mrs. Feldman, a poet and translator of Italian literature, died
Saturday, January 11, 2003, in the Hebrew Rehabilitation Center for the
Aged in Boston, Massachusetts, at the age of 91.

Ruth (Wasby) Feldman led a double life. She spent six months of the year
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she played along with classical
recordings on a baby grand piano in her condo overlooking the Charles
River. The other six months she lived in the Hotel de la Ville at the
top of the Spanish Steps in Rome, where she rubbed elbows with Italian
literati.

"In Cambridge she was this sort of very nice old lady tooling about town
in her blue 1963 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, but in Rome she became `Senora
Feldman' and was very tapped in to the local literary scene," her
nephew, Dick Lehrberg of Palo Alto, Calif., said yesterday.

Mrs. Feldman was the author of five books of poetry and translator of 15
books originally published in Italian, including poetry and
concentration camp stories by Primo Levi. She was the recipient of many
awards, including the John Florio Prize in England and the Italo Calvino
Prize in the United States, and received a literary translator's
fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

But she originally wanted to be a painter.

Mrs. Feldman was born in Liverpool, Ohio. Her father died when she was a
young woman and her mother was among the 123 people who died in the 1929
Cleveland Clinic fire, when she was just 17.

After her mother's death she moved to the Bay State to be near her
brother, Milton, now deceased, who was attending Harvard Law School. She
lived with her brother while attending Wellesley College.

"Though she wasn't born here she was a very proper Bostonian, very
elegant and graceful," said her nephew Roger Lehrberg. "She often wore
white gloves."

Shortly after graduating from Wellesley, she married Moses "Tommy"
Feldman, an attorney who specialized in real estate law.

"In those days, women didn't work, so she began studying painting," said
Roger. The couple traveled by ocean liner to Europe several times to
make the grand tour and examine the great works of art. Mrs. Feldman
began to specialize in landscapes in oil that were exhibited locally and
now hang in the homes of family and friends.

In 1963 her husband died of a heart attack.

"She never painted again," said Roger. "It was something she associated
with her marriage."

Mrs. Feldman turned her attention to poetry and began to take classes at
Radcliffe College.

"I think it was a way to express her sadness," said Roger. The title of
her first collection was "The Ambition of Ghosts."

According to Roger, Mrs. Feldman had "three major tragedies in her life,
and after each she was able to create a new life: the death of her
mother, the death of her husband, and eventually the loss of her sight."

Mrs. Feldman never had good eyesight and wore glasses from an early age.

Late in life, Mrs. Feldman's sight began to decline further.

In 1993, "in the interest of public safety," Roger bought her beloved
Coupe de Ville, giving her an Apple computer in return. At the age of
82, Mrs. Feldman learned to use the computer, where she had the benefit
of enlarged type. Every once in a while, Roger would drop by to give her
a ride in the Cadillac that her husband had bought her shortly before
his death.