Florence Weinberger
Florence Weinberger was born in Manhattan, raised in the Bronx, educated at Hunter College, California State University, Northridge, and UCLA, and has worked as a teacher, legal investigator, and consumer advocate, and a volunteer for the Shanti Foundation. She began to write poetry before she read poetry, and dabbled in other exotic forms of expression: a Halloween play in fourth grade; a novel in seventh grade, never finished; an essay on how to defuse an incendiary bomb. She published several short stories and produced two adult novels, unpublished, but it was in poetry where she found an art that challenged and satisfied. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize, her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. She is the author of two books of poetry, The Invisible Telling Its Shape (Fithian 1997) and Breathing Like a Jew (Crimson Edge 1997).
As a first generation American, Weinberger understood the immigrant experience, and still in her teens, befriended Holocaust survivors, close relatives among them, who made their way to America in the late forties and early fifties. She met Ted Weinberger, a survivor of forced labor and concentration camps, and they married in 1955. In love with his work, grateful for a second chance at life, for family and friends and good health, Ted was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma in 1998, as he and Weinberger were about to leave for a vacation in Italy. The two-year battle with cancer had begun.
Poets are doctors and insurance salespeople and caregivers, and always they walk a narrow road, seeking balance between the private life and its transmutation into truth and art. As wife and caregiver, Weinberger continued to write. With cancer so prevalent, the personal had become ordinary, fear and hope and grief everyday experiences. In her poetry, Weinberger gave voice to her strange/common new life with all the truth and depth she could muster. Carnal Fragrance moves across that vast landscape of disbelief, despair, mordant humor, hope, and resignation, and finally, acceptance.
