Her Russian Orthodox father, Ivan Zhirkov, was a village teacher who later became a bookseller and textbook publisher; her mother was descended from Irish Catholics who had settled in Russia after the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815).

Elisheva recalls in her memoir that already in elementary school she had become familiar with names of places that featured in adventure books for young people, including several Latin American cities and Galveston, Texas.

Her interest in Hebrew was kindled after she chanced upon a Hebrew-language newspaper and saw an advertisement for a steamship company recommended as an easy, convenient way to cross the Atlantic Ocean.

[3] Thus it was that in 1913 she began studying Hebrew through evening classes at the “Общество распространения правильных сведений о евреях и еврействе”, Obshchestvo rasprostraneniya pravil'nykh svedeniy o yevreyakh i yevreystve (“Society for the dissemination of correct information about Jews and Judaism”), founded in 1906 by a group of Jewish public figures in Moscow that included Uri Nissan Gnessin (1879–1913), Yosef Haim Brenner (1881–1921), Echiel Tschlenow (1864–1918) and her future husband, Simeon Bikhovski (1880–1932),[4] who also began the publishing house Nisyonot (“Experiments”) in that year.

Lacking the required “право жительства”, pravo zhitel'stva (right of residence) in the capital, the teacher was regarded as living there illegally and was forced to leave Moscow, but Elisheva continued to learn Hebrew off and on during the next two years.

[3] In Ryazan, with some sleuthing and the help of a local rabbi, she was led to a scholar in an attic room who used to tutor boys in reciting the Jewish prayer book, the Siddur.

This teacher — very young but with a thick, curly black beard — she wrote, combined “a taste for biblical grandeur with childlike naïveté.” After she demonstrated her ability to read the prayer book's morning blessing (Modah ani lefanecha... (“I thank You...”), he consented to help her continue her Hebrew study.

[2] During her time in Ryazan between 1917 and 1919, as her Hebrew skills were deepening, she composed over 200 Russian poems, published by her fiancé Simeon Bikhovski in two 1919 collections, “Минуты” Minuty (“Minutes”) and “Тайные песни” Tainye Pesni (“Secret songs”).

[4] Elisheva's poetry also appeared in the almanac Ha-Tkufa (“Epoch”, Warsaw, 1921), the magazine Ha-Toren (“The Mast”, New York, 1922), Hapoel Hatzair (“The Young Worker”, Tel Aviv, 1923) and "Ha-Olam" ("The World", London, 1925).

[6] She moved into a rundown shack on the edge of Tel Aviv, where she was saved from starvation when the poet Hayim Nahman Bialik secured for her a modest stipend of $15 monthly from the non-profit Israel Matz Foundation, a New York nonprofit organization established to aid indigent Hebrew writers.

Despite the deep affection Elisheva maintained for Jewish culture and its involvement in the eventual establishment of the state of Israel, she had never converted to Judaism — a fact that she never hid; she always remained an Orthodox Christian — so difficulties arose as to the place of burial.

Only upon the intervention of the chairman of the Hebrew Writers Association in Israel was it agreed that she could be buried in the cemetery of Kvutzat Kinneret, near the grave of the poet Rachel Bluwstein.