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Frieda Johles Forman

Frieda Johles Forman was born in Vienna into a Yiddish-speaking family. After attending Hebrew College in Boston, she taught Hebrew and Jewish Studies, as well as Women’s Studies and Philosophy at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, where she founded “Kids Can Press.” She founded, and for two decades directed, the Women’s Educational Resource Centre at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her publications include Taking Our Time: Feminist Perspectives of Temporalit. She was the researcher, an editor and translator of Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers. Currently, she is writing a memoir of her refugee years in Switzerland during World War II.

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Sarah Reisen

Sarah Reisen was both a gifted Yiddish writer in her own right and a respected translator of great literature into Yiddish for children and adults. Recognized by contemporaries for her humane literary sensibility, she brought to Yiddish literature not only her own creative works but also her translations, which introduced readers of all ages to world literature.

Rikudah Potash

Crowned “the Poetess of Jerusalem” by Sholem Asch, Rikudah Potash wrote in Yiddish about the landscape of her beloved city and its diverse ethnic communities. She brought to Yiddish readers the rarely seen Middle Eastern Jewish woman. Potash’s Jerusalem, both the heavenly and the earthly, was a capacious universe that she inhabited, body and soul, for thirty years.

Sarah Hamer-Jacklyn

Sarah Hamer-Jacklyn’s popular Yiddish tales not only painted a vivid portrait of the lost shtetl of her youth, but also added a dimension male authors of the time had missed: a nuanced and complex picture of the lives of Jewish women.

Shira Gorshman

A multi-faceted Yiddish writer, Shira Gorshman embodied the vision and struggles of Jewish socialism throughout her long and productive life. Her work encompassed the shtetl of Lithuania, pioneering Palestine, the Soviet experiment, the Holocaust, and finally the return to modern Israel. In all these journeys her characters, many of whom are women, are revealed in their full humanity and individuality.

Rokhel Brokhes

Rohkel Brokhes offered an intimate and poignant glimpse into Jewish family life in Russia in the early 20th century. Her short stories, novellas, and plays documented the often-harsh lives of Russian Jews, especially women. She was born and raised in Minsk, and she would also die there in the ghetto.

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How to cite this page

Jewish Women's Archive. "Frieda Johles Forman." (Viewed on March 28, 2024) <http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/author/forman-frieda>.