We are Sad to Report the Deaths of These Outstanding Women

Enid Dame, 60, of cancer. In her seven books of poetry, she deftly mixed images from Brooklyn with Midrash. Sometimes Biblical matriarchs appear in her poems, but reimagined in modern guise, as in this excerpt from her poem entitled Lilith, one of Dame’s favorite characters; Two against one/It isn’t fair! I cried/And stormed out of Eden/Into history …/now/I work in New jersey/ take art lessons/live with a cabdriver… Dame was one of the editors of the anthology Which Lilith?

Author Olivia Goldsmith, Her best-selling novel The First Wives Club, a comedy-fantasy about the delicious revenge three women take on the husbands who have left them for younger women, became a hit film. Goldsmith died from complications after receiving anesthesia during cosmetic surgery.

Dr. Gertie Marx, ,91, who pioneered the use of the epidural anaesthesia during childbirth. Born in Frankfurt, she left Germany in the 1930s after the Nazis beginning barring Jews from the universities. She received her medical degree in Switzerland in 1937, afterwards immigrating to New York.