Kadya Molodowsky

Irena Klepfisz

Irena Klepfisz is a poet whose legacy is key to the history of Jewish, American and lesbian literature. Klepfisz is also a pioneer of the recovery of Jewish and Yiddish women’s writing, to which she has dedicated translations, research, teaching, and activism.

April 9, 2012

Yiddish poetry: It's not just for men!

Talia bat Pessi

Most people believe that Yiddish literature and poetry was written solely by men. In reality, there were hundreds of female Yiddish writers and poets, all of whom had their own distinct biographies and writing styles. Edith Kaplan Bregman was one of these women. She was born in a Russian shtetl in 1899 to a Hasidic family, immigrating to New York when she was 13. In America, she was exposed to literature that hadn’t been available in Europe, so she became a voracious reader. Bregman went on to write poetry in her native tongue, Yiddish. Her love of language led her to meet many Yiddish literary giants, like Avrom Reyzen, a poet who became her mentor. While she wrote poems throughout her early life, her works weren’t published until 1939, when a Yiddish newspaper had a poetry contest that she entered and won. Her victory gave her the confidence to publish more of her written work. Some of the themes that recur throughout her poems are a love of Judaism and God, life in Europe, and Holocaust remembrance. In addition to writing poetry, Bregman sang and played the mandolin and piano. Bregman’s last poem was published in 1997, a few years before her death at age 99.

Topics: Poetry

http://jwa.org/blog/yiddish-poetry-its-not-just-for-men

Yiddish: Women's Poetry

Women’s poetry in Yiddish first made its presence felt within the wider context of modern Yiddish culture in the late 1910s. Exploring topics from gender in Judaism to queer sexuality and eroticism, women’s Yiddish poetry cemented itself as its own literary corpus with priceless value and contribution to Yiddish literary culture.

Yiddish Literature in the United States

Writers of a broad range of texts—passionate and erotic lyrical verse, social realist fiction, affecting descriptions of immigrant life, nostalgic paeans to their Eastern European homes, dirges to those murdered in the Holocaust—Yiddish women writers were modernists and traditionalists, romantics and realists, prose writers and poets. They represent no single school or line of development, but rather the range of women’s voices contained in Yiddish literature.

Kadya Molodowsky was a major figure in the Yiddish literary scene in Warsaw (from the 1920s through 1935) and in New York (from 1935 until her death in 1975). She published extensively in many genres, including poetry, fiction, drama, and essays, and founded and edited two journals. Recurrent themes in her work include the lives of Jewish women and girls Jewish tradition in the face of modernity, Israel, and the Holocaust.

Ruth Whitman

Poet Ruth Whitman was known for her acclaimed translations of Yiddish poetry, as well as for her own autobiographical work. She wrote a series of narrative poems in the voices of women from the past, including Lizzie Borden, Tamsen Donner, Hanna Szenes, and Hatshepsut, the only woman pharaoh in ancient Egypt. In these, she explored problems with sexual identity, love, work, and motherhood.

Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman

Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman was a Yiddish author, poet, editor, educator, graphic artist, folklorist, songwriter, Yiddish territorialist, and community activist. Schaechter-Gottesman bridged the old world and the new as an award-winning modern writer of Yiddish poetry.

Poetry in the United States

The contributions of Jewish women poets to American literary history and political activism, as well as to the enrichment of Jewish culture and practice, are astounding. Many Jewish women poets write with a strong sense of social responsibility and a desire to create poetry that can shape reality, drawing on the Jewish teachings of tikkun olam.

Holocaust Literature

Literature by and about women and the Holocaust explores the impact of the Nazi genocide on women during and after the war, its impact on subsequent generations, and the reflections of women on the implications of the Holocaust. Encompassing a range of literary genres, including fiction, poetry, drama and memoir, women’s Holocaust writing explores the intersection of history, imagination, Jewishness and gender.

Sharing Stories
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Kadya Molodowsky

Irena Klepfisz

Yiddish poetry: It's not just for men!

Yiddish: Women's Poetry

Yiddish Literature in the United States