Tanya Plutzik Obituary
Published by Legacy Remembers on Jul. 17, 2025.
Rochester, NY - Tanya Roth Plutzik, an active member of the greater Rochester community for eight decades as a social worker, school psychologist, local administrator for the federal anti-poverty program and supporter of the arts, died on July 5, 2025 at the age of 106.
She was the widow of poet Hyam Plutzik, faculty member at the University of Rochester and a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, who died at 50 in 1962. Since his passing, she has been a passionate champion of his work. The University of Rochester recently celebrated the 62nd year of the Plutzik Poetry Series, considered to be the longest running public reading series on an American campus.
Tanya Plutzik was born as Taube Rajtgartz in Nemirov, Ukraine on June 17, 1919 and emigrated to the United States two years later. The family left Antwerp on the USS Kroonland on April 28, 1921, with her parents whose surnames were Americanized on arrival, Abraham Roth and Maika (Mary) Duberman, her brother Joe and her maternal grandfather Mayer Duberman (b. 1840). After their arrival in the US on May 10, 1921, the Roths settled in Brownsville, Brooklyn.
Tanya graduated at 16 from Grover Cleveland High School and at 20 from Brooklyn College. She and Hyam Plutzik were married in 1943, and traveled extensively throughout the American South before his deployment to England with the US Army Air Corps.
In 1945, she moved with her husband to Rochester, New York where he had joined the English faculty at the University. In their home, they entertained many authors Hyam had invited to read at the University of Rochester, including Saul Bellow, John Dos Passos, Theodore Roethke, and Stephen Spender.
After Professor Plutzik's death in 1962, left with four children aged three to thirteen, Tanya returned to school and obtained a master's degree in education from the University of Rochester. She served as a school psychologist for Greece Central Schools for seventeen years. She also became the first director of downtown Rochester's Neighborhood Service Center, under the auspices of the Federal program, Action for a Better Community.
After her retirement she devoted herself to her late husband's literary legacy, working with U.S. Poet Laureate and successor to Plutzik in the University's English Department, Anthony Hecht, editor of Plutzik's Collected Poems, which was published in 1987. She contributed to the scenario for the 2007 documentary film Hyam Plutzik: American Poet, directed by Oscar nominee Christine Choy and Ku-ling Siegel. In 2021, Obama inaugural poet Richard Blanco contributed the foreword to 32 Poems / 32 Poemas, a bilingual English-Spanish edition of Plutzik's poetry. The book included a quatrain for Tanya that Hyam had written seventy years earlier: "Money won't mix with art or love/As oil won't mix with water/The pure life and the mild life/Will make you live a hundred."
Tanya Plutzik is survived by her four children (and their spouses), Roberta Baldwin (Neil Baldwin), Alan Plutzik (Carolyn Plutzik), Jonathan Plutzik (Lesley Goldwasser), and Deborah Briggs (Jeff Briggs), nine grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
On July 7, 2025, she was interred in Old Montefiore Cemetery in Queens, New York, where her husband is buried. The publication of a new book exploring Hyam Plutzik's poetry, "Hyam Plutzik and the Mosaic of Time" was announced in early June for release this summer. The editors have dedicated the book to Tanya Plutzik.