Eliyahu David Shapir (Shapira) — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

Born in the Cesarka estate (then in the Russian Empire, later in Lithuania), into a family of rabbis. He studied at the "Tarbut" Gymnasium in Vilkomir, where he later became a teacher of literature and Hebrew. He also studied Semitic languages at the University of Kovno under his relative, the linguist and literary scholar Chaim Nahman Shapira. He was part of the Lithuanian modernist Hebrew literary group Petach, which was something of a branch of the Eretz-Israeli literary circle Ktuvim. He contributed to the group's journal (Petach) and to its only literary collection (Pa’am, Kovno, 1933), alongside Nathan Alterman, Leah Goldberg, and others.

He immigrated to Israel in 1938 and joined the Yachdav literary group led by Avraham Shlonsky. He collaborated with Alterman and Israel Zmora in founding the literary publishing house Machbarot Lesifrut.

He began publishing in the Hebrew press in Kovno with poems (from 1929), essays (from 1931), and short stories (from 1932). Some of his early stories were later reworked into the collection The First Limited Attempt to Return (Sifriyat Tarmil, 1968), under the pen name David Dar. Under the same pseudonym, he published a book of poems in 1957, Marom Harim ("Heights of the Mountains"). Other pseudonyms he used included D. Efer and A. D. Sh.

He translated many books from Yiddish, German, and English, including:

• Culture and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud (in collaboration with Y. Rosenzweig and S. Golan, 1943)

• Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne (with V. Israelit, 1943)

• House of Crisis (1947–1951, two volumes) by the Yiddish author Der Nister (pen name of Pinchas Kahanovich)

• The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens (1971)

He was awarded the Tchernichovsky Prize for exemplary translation (1972). He also worked as an editor. Notably, he edited nine issues of Moznaim (October 1970 – September 1971) and served as an editor at the Am Oved, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, and Dvir publishing houses, where he edited the "Library for the People" (Sifriya La'am) series, among others.

His writing is marked by a tone of longing and yearning; the subject matter is secondary to the emotion of yearning itself. In his prose, mostly autobiographical, it is a yearning for a lost world (due to growing up or historical change), while in his poetry it is longing for an unattainable beloved or for the romantic image of a "blue blossom." Compared to his contemporaries, his writing is often seen as epigonic (derivative). However, his contribution as a “craftsman of literature,” only partially known, is undoubtedly significant.

From: Gideon Tikotzky, Heksherim Lexicon of Israeli Literature