Jeta's poem, by Moshe
Late Dr. Moshe Landsman was the founder of Psychology Department in the Prishtina University. He dedicated this poem to one of his students, Jeta Deva, who was also a guest in our podcast Suzanne.
Jeta
While the wind whistles the Jackdaws to the trees,
As the rain politely washes clean the sand,
Between night and night
Between thunder and thunder
As the cows desert the corn,
In a rend-asunder land a girl is born,
And life her name, she bestowed upon despair.
She lifts her eyes to catch the waning moon
She lifts her arms to reach the blazing sun
Our carefree years for her are toil and care
Her sixteenth year calls to gracious acts alone.
May you grow to see your dreams to light of day,
May you gather every tear to turn for right.
May you make each mile courageous with your steps
May I bask one second in your hour of light.
(from Moshe, sent for Sept 16 2009)
Dr Moshe Landsman was born in 1949 in Syracuse, New York and by the age of two lived in Nashville Tennessee and then Gainesville Florida, where his father was professor of Psychology at the University of Florida.
His father, Ted Landsman, had once worked as Kurt Lewin's assistant as an undergraduate and was an early member of SPSSI. In 1967 he moved to Israel and received BA and MA degrees at the Hebrew University and PhD at Bar-Ilan University. For many years he worked in the field as a psychologist in the community. His work was with Moroccan and Indian Jews in small towns in the Israel desert, then with Palestinian Bedouins (where he set up several psychological services for Bedouin in southern Israel) and with Palestinians in Gaza.
From the year 2000 he have become involved with Kosova, where he was key in establishing the Department of Psychology at the University of Prishtina and later began working with school psychologists in Albania. In later years he has been working as field coordinator for establishing the clinical psychology track at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia. In Israel he taught at Kaye Academic Teachers College in Beer-Sheva.
He was married to Leah Shakdiel for 31 years and had 7 children (one of them a long-term foster child) and 25 grandchildren. Professor Moshe Landsman was honored in 2023 by the Kosovo Ministry of Education, Science, Technology and Innovation for his contribution to the field of education and the development of the field of psychology in Kosova. Dr. Landsman passed away in January 2024.
Jeta Deva, a psychologist and the founder of Kosovo’s Association for Autism was a student of Dr. Landsman in 2006 and spoke of Dr Landsman warmly as a mentor, in the episode 5 of Suzanne Podcast: