Where are the women Yiddish writers?

(Author: Cecil Bloom, Vol. 71, No. 1, Pesach 2016)

Like their non-Jewish counterparts, Jewish women have over many years put their pens to paper. Certainly, they have been prominent in writing fiction in English and Hebrew, with much of their work matching that of their male counterparts. The work of the 19thCentury English writers Grace Aguilar and Amy Levy is of high quality, and such 20th Century writers as Glenda Charles and Bernice Rubens in Britain and Anzia Yezierskia, Cynthia Ozick and Grace Paley in the US have continued this progress. In Israel, women writers writing in Hebrew include Orly Castel-Bloom and Shulamith Hareven. But where are, or were, the women who wrote in Yiddish?

Males dominate the lists of Yiddish writers, whereas few Yiddish stories by women have appeared in the many English-translated anthologies that have been published. Perhaps the leading Yiddish anthology of stories translated into English is A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, edited by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg. This contains the short stories of 23 male writers, but no female ones. An Anthology of Modern Yiddish Literature, edited by the eminent literary critic Joseph Leftwich and published by the prestigious International P.E.N. Books, contains nine stories, all by men. The book’s lengthy bibliography likewise lists only male Yiddish writers. Charles Madison’s Yiddish Literature and Sol Liptzin’s A History of Yiddish Literature are two other major works on the subject. They list many writers, but their extensive bibliographies include no women authors. From a Land Far Off, a selection of South African Yiddish writers, contains fiction by fourteen writers, all male. The Foreword and lengthy Introduction, written by Dan Jacobson and Joseph Sherman respectively, make no reference to female writers. There is only one woman who wrote in Yiddish mentioned in some works on the subject, namely Glückel of Hameln (1646-1724). However, the period in which she lived is well outside the scope of this essay.

While much fictional writing in Yiddish by men has been in the short-story form, long novels have also been written. Those by Mendele Mokher Seforim, Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch, the Singer Brothers, Der Nister (Pinchas Kahanovitch), Chaim Grade and David Bergelson are some examples. With very few exceptions, those women who have written Yiddish fiction seem generally to have ignored the full-length form. But women have been prominent in writing poetry in Yiddish, and much of this is considered to be of high quality. There is now much interest in Yiddish fictional works by women, and female (but not male) literary critics have been addressing the reasons for why women writers have been neglected. A few anthologies have been published that have concentrated on these writers. These show that women, mostly born in Europe but generally ending up in the United States or Canada, were writing fiction in Yiddish much earlier than was generally believed. Of the 24 writers listed below, sixteen were born in the 19th Century and only one post-1918. Quite a few were near-contemporaries of some of the leading Yiddish male writers, and some were arguably just as talented but have not been properly recognised as such. Nevertheless, the compendium Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century (2003), which lists 343 writers, of whom 102 were born in the previous century, mentions only three women as having written fiction in Yiddish. No Star Too Beautiful, a short story collection published in 2002 and edited by Joachim Neugroschel, contains stories written from 1382 to the present, and lists 45 Yiddish writers from the 19th and 20thCenturies; of these, only seven are women, all 20th Century.

Some recent publications, however, have properly drawn attention to women writing in Yiddish.

Found Treasures, published in 1994, noted that while women prose writers were hardly acknowledged to exist, over three hundred women actually did publish Yiddish literature between 1927 and 1986. The book identifies some eighteen of these, and includes stories by them. The anthology Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars (2003) contains stories by twelve women writers and Arguing with the Storm, published four years later, lists nine more. Carole Balin’s To Reveal our Heartsrefers to the presence of sixty-seven Jewish women writers in Czarist Russia. Of these, only six wrote in Yiddish, seventeen wrote in Hebrew and, incredibly, the remainder wrote in Russian. Even more recently a 2013 anthology, entitled The Exile Book of Yiddish Women Writers, has appeared, contains 22 stories by thirteen women. These books all demonstrate that Jewish women, while they have been prolific in English and Hebrew novel-writing, have generally ignored full-length fiction in Yiddish.

One explanation put forward for the paucity of women writing Yiddish fiction is that they had little time for literary efforts due to their domestic duties. This, however, would appear to be a weak excuse, since many were attracted to the writing of poetry, surely just as difficult as writing fiction. Anita Norich of the Department of English and Judaic Studies, University of Michigan, has suggested that poetry can sometimes be written despite hectic schedules that include the responsibilities of earning a livelihood and raising a family, whereas the expansive form of the novel requires time and publishing resources rarely available to women. Is this really true, however? Norich further suggests that the many women who immigrated to the United States before 1924 and who did write never conceived of themselves as a literary group, since they were equally cut off from one another and from the centres of Yiddish publication. These women were educated in Eastern Europe, for the most part receiving a better secular education but a less complete religious education than their brothers. The argument that men could use their religious learning to help them in telling stories in contrast to women who were generally confined to the home is surely a tenuous one. Another explanation put forward for male domination in fictional writing is that the Jewish storytelling tradition is associated with religious learning, midrash and aggadah and men could tell their stories in the prayer house, between prayers, even as prayers but women, for the most part, could not do so. Early on, there was at least one male who understood the problem resulting from the absence of women being accepted as Yiddish fiction writers. He was the poet Aaron Glants who, in 1915, wrote that the full development of Yiddish literature would only be achieved if women played a full role in it.

Hereunder follows a list, with accompanying biographical details, of some of the women who wrote in the Yiddish language:

• Dvora Baron (1887-1956) was born in Lithuania and went on aliyah in 1910. She wrote mostly in Hebrew but her early work was in Yiddish.
• Polish-born Lili Berger (1916-1995) was a prolific writer of novels and short stories. Her major work Fun haynt un nekhten (Of Today and Yesterday) dealt with Jewish life in Poland.
• Rokhl Brokhes (1880-1945) was born in Minsk, Russia, and was murdered by the Nazis. She wrote many short stories. A zamlung dertseylungen (A Collection of Stories) described the life of impoverished Jewish women in Russia.
• Celia Dropkin (1888-1956) wrote much poetry, but also many short stories, a single volume of which was published after her death.
• Rochel Faygenberg (1885-1972) was born in Belarus. Moving to Odessa, she published many stories, the first at the age of twenty. A novella A mame (a Mother), appeared six years later and was followed by a number of short stories. She eventually settled in Palestine and wrote both in Hebrew and Yiddish. She published over ten books of translations, fiction and historical documents, as well as essays on Jewish thought, literary criticism, and the status of women. Her first novel Af fremde vegn (Alien Paths) appeared in 1925. She continued to write in Yiddish, although Hebrew became her main language.
• Sheindl Franzus-Garfinkle (1889-1957) was born in the Ukraine and moved to Montreal in 1922. Her short stories and novels on life in the Russian villages, Rochl (Rachel) and Erev Oktober (On the Eve of October), received much critical praise.
• Shira Gorshman (1906-2001) was born in Lithuania. In 1924, she went to Palestine, where she worked for the great Hebrew poet Bialik. A few years later, she moved to Odessa and then to Moscow, where she wrote short stories mainly about life in the Russian shtetls. Later she returned to Israel. 33 Noveln (33 Short Stories), published in 1961, contained much of her output.
• Frume Halpern (1888-1966) published stories in a Communist paper after arriving in the US in 1905. Perhaps her most memorable story is Drei mol bagegnt (Three Meetings), the setting of which is the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York that claimed the lives of over a hundred workers.
• Sarah Hamer-Jacklyn (1905-1975) was born in Poland to Chassidic parents, with whom she moved to Canada. There, she flirted with the Yiddish theatre, and wrote many short stories concentrating on women’s life in the shtetls that appeared in a number of Canadian and American journals. Two important publications are her first collection Lebens un gestalten (Lives and Portraits) and Shtamen un tsveygn (Sumps and Branches).
• Rachel Korn (1898-1982) was Galician-born and is best-known for her poetry. Her first literary language was Polish but, taught by her husband, she switched to Yiddish. She went to Russia during World War II and then back to Poland where, in 1946, she was the first Jewish writer to be invited to join the PEN club in Stockholm. She lived in Stockholm until 1948, when she finally moved to Montreal. Korn wrote much poetry, which was well received, as well as two volumes of short stories. She won the Israeli Manger Prize for Yiddish literature in 1974.
• Esther Kreitman (1891-1954) was the elder sister of two of the greatest Yiddish writers of the 20th Century, Israel Joshua and Isaac Bashevis Singer. While her output was low, she is unquestionably the greatest of the writers in this list, and the best known woman who wrote in Yiddish. Today, she is acknowledged as a writer of stature. Kreitman’s short stories and two semi-autobiographical novels should at the time have been noted by the critics who, however, sadly neglected her work. Her first novel Der Sheydim Tants (Dance of the Demons) was published in Poland in 1936, appearing in English as Deborah in 1946. Clearly autobiographical, it begins in pre-World War I Poland. The daughter of a respectable, principled, unambitious rabbi very similar to Kreitman’s own father, Deborah wants to marry a Marxist she met in the Warsaw ghetto. Instead, she is forced into an arranged marriage, from which she eventually escapes. Kreitman’s second novel, Brilyantn (Diamonds), also semi-autobiographical and a family saga, first appeared in 1944 in London and in English translation, many years later, in 2009. It is based on life firstly in Antwerp and the diamond business there and then later in London, and describes the pressures on a traditional Jewish family forced to change their way of life in the modern world.
• Malka Lee (1904-1972), born in Galicia, moved to New York on her own at the age of sixteen. She wrote much poetry but also short stories, written for her son, called Mayselekh far Yoselen (Little Stories for Joseph).• Born in Belarus, Bertha Lelchuk (1901-after 1940) spent some time in Palestine and then moved to the US in 1923. There, she wrote stories and articles for Yiddish periodicals around the world, and is believed to have appeared in some Hollywood films. Although she did not experience life under the Nazis, she wrote many stories about those who did.
• Blume Lempel (1907-1999) was born in Galicia. In 1929, she moved to Paris and ten years later to New York, where she wrote stories for Yiddish magazines and newspapers. Two collections of these are Arege fun emes (A moment of truth) and Balade fun a kholem (Ballad of a Dream).
• Helen Londynski (1896- 1992) was born in Poland to a wealthy Chassidic family. She worked in Warsaw for a company that published Yiddish literature (including that of I J Singer), and in 1942 moved to New York after many years as a refugee in different countries. There, she wrote pieces for a number of Yiddish journals.
• Ida Maze (1893-1962) was born in White Russia, but she lived most of her life in Canada. A prolific poetess, her one novel, Denah, describes the Jewish life of her childhood.
• Kadya Molodowsky (1894-1975), a rabbi’s daughter, was born in Lithuania. She became a leading figure in Yiddish literary circles, both in Warsaw and later in New York. She published many poems, plays and essays as well as two novels, Fun Lublin biz Nyu York (From Lublin to New York) and Baym toyer: roman fun dem lebn in yisroel (At the Gate), a novel of life in Israel. She also wrote a short story collection A shtub mit zibn fenster (A House with Seven Windows) and in 1971 received the Manger Prize for Yiddish Literature.
• Rikudah Potash (1903-1965) was born in Poland and settled in Jerusalem in 1934. Her novel Ingeslekh fun Yerusholoyim (In the Alleyways of Jerusalem) is about Sephardi Jews coming to Israel and their problems in settling there.
• Born in Poland, Chava Rosenfarb (1923-2011) survived the Holocaust and went to Belgium and thereafter to Canada. She wrote poetry and many novels, winning the Manger Prize amongst other prestigious awards.
• Dora Schulner (1889-1962) was born in Kiev and immigrated to the US. She wrote many short stories that covered religious as well as secular life in Russia and in America. Her two novels are Miltchin and Esther.
• Yente Serdatsky (1877-1962) was born in Lithuania. She moved to Warsaw to develop her writing skills and then to the US in 1907 where she published stories in a number of Yiddish periodicals including Der Forverts (Forward). Her only collection entitled Geklibene shriftn (Selected Works) was published as early as 1913.
• Mirl Erdberg Shatan (1894-1982) was born in Poland and moved to Montreal in 1926. There, she worked at a Yiddish newspaper and published many short stories.
• Fradel Shtok (1890-after 1945). Born in East Galicia, she immigrated to the US in 1907 and began writing fiction and poetry. Her only published collection contains stories about the shtetl from which she came and about life in New York. Shtok also wrote one novel in English, entitled For Musicians Only.
• Sarah Smith (1888-?) was born in Budapest and moved to the US as a child. At the age of twenty, she began writing stories, published in Der Forverts, that described impoverished Jewish and non-Jewish life.

Cecil Bloom, a veteran contributor to Jewish Affairs, is a former technical director of a multinational pharmaceutical firm in the UK. His essays on Jewish themes relating to music, literature, history and Bible have also appeared in Midstream and Jewish Quarterly.