A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hellerstein, Kathryn, author.

A question of tradition : women poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987 / Kathryn Hellerstein.

pages cm—(Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-5622-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Yiddish poetry—Women authors—History and criticism.   2. Jewish poetry—Women authors—History and criticism.   I. Title.   II. Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture.

PJ5122.H45 2014

839'.114099287—dc23

2014007330

ISBN 978-0-8047-9397-1 (electronic)

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10.5/14 Galliard.

STANFORD STUDIES IN JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE

EDITED BY Aron Rodrigue and Steven J. Zipperstein

A Question of Tradition

Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586–1987

Kathryn Hellerstein

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

To the memory of my parents,

Mary L. Feil Hellerstein and Herman K. Hellerstein,

who taught me the tradition

To my husband,

David Stern,

with whom I hand down tradition

And to our children,

Rebecca and Jonah,

who renew the tradition.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Idea of a Literary Tradition

2. Old Poems in a Modern Anthology

3. Revolution, Prayers, and Sisterhood in Interwar Poland

4. The Folk and the Book: Miriam Ulinover and Roza Yakubovitsh

5. The Art of Sex: Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

6. Prayer-Poems against History: Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

Conclusion

Appendix:

Letters from Women Poets to Ezra Korman, 1926–1927

Bibliographic Essays

Celia Dropkin

Anna Margolin

Kadya Molodowsky

Malka Heifetz Tussman

Miriam Ulinover

Roza Yakubovitsh

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

I have been working on A Question of Tradition for some twenty-five years, and during this period, a number of foundations have offered me generous support. The National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for College Teachers (1987); the University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation (1994–1995); the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation (1994–1995); the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (CAJS) at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) (2003 and 2005); and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1999–2000). I wish to express my deepest appreciation to all of these foundations for their support.

During this same period, I have also incurred many debts of gratitude to individuals. The first group of these are the Yiddish poets whom I have been fortunate to meet and discuss my work with: the late Malka Heifetz Tussman, my teacher and mentor, who originally gave me the idea for this book; Rivka Basman Ben-Haim; and the late Hadassah Rubin.

I am fortunate to have discussed this project along the way with many people, whose insights and responses kept me going. I thank my friends: Ann Greene, Mimi Gross, Lisa Katz, Rita Mendes-Flohr, Ruby Rain, Carol Vlack, Barbara Von Schlegell, and Linda Zisquit, and the members of the Philadelphia Women Writers Group—Cynthia Baughman, Deborah Burnham, Carolyn Daffron, Ann de Forest, Adele Greenspun, Emily Harting, Molly Layton, Carolyn Raskin, Karen Rile, and Jeanne Murray Walker. I am deeply grateful to colleagues around the world who answered my questions or shared their expert knowledge and critical acumen in response to my lectures or essays that comprised earlier versions of parts of this book: Hamutal Bar Yosef, Dan Ben-Amos, S. Z. (Shlomo) Berger, Yael Chaver, Marcia Falk, Robert and Molly Freedman, Amelia Glaser, Nili Gold, Fern Kant, Natalia Krynicka, Lori Lefkovitz, Catriona MacLeod, Shulamit Magnus, Barbara Mann, Goldie Morgentaler, Kenneth Moss, Avraham Novershtern, Simon Richter, Lawrence Rosenwald, David Roskies, Moshe Rosman, Ellen Spolsky, Michael Steinlauf, Karolina Szymaniak, Jeffrey Tigay, Liliane Weissberg, Chava Weissler, Beth Wenger, Shira Wolosky, and Sheva Zucker. I especially want to acknowledge those who read drafts of this work and offered valuable criticism: Deborah Burnham, Anita Norich, David Stern, Chava Turniansky, and Bethany Wiggin. My dear friend and teacher John Felstiner encouraged me in this project over the years; I am extremely appreciative.

I continually learn from my students, especially in my course at Penn on women and Jewish literature. I found particularly valuable responses by the graduate students in the course on women Yiddish poets that I taught at Columbia in 2007, as well as by the doctoral students in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Penn. Parts of this book appeared in earlier forms, as articles, and I am grateful to the editors of the volumes in which they were published: Lewis Fried; Gabriella Safran and Benjamin Nathans; and Sheila Jelen, Michael Kramer, and Scott Lerner.

I am indebted to Mimi Gross and the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation for finding and granting me permission to use the beautiful 1927 drawing by Chaim Gross for the cover of this book.

The children and families of a number of the poets in this book were of great assistance to me, graciously sharing their memories and knowledge, and encouraging me in my work on the women Yiddish poets. I am deeply grateful to Joseph Tussman (zl); Ben Litman (zl); Edith Schwarz; Anne Heilman (zl); John Dropkin (zl); and Ruth Dropkin. I am also grateful to Isaac (Ying) Halpern and to the late David Rosenthal, a student of Kadya Molodowsky in Warsaw.

I am indebted to the librarians, archivists, and staff at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research; at the Jewish National Library of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem; and especially at Penn’s Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, where I benefited tremendously from the expertise of Seth Jershower, Arthur Kiron, Judith Leifer, and Bruce Nielsen. I am also grateful to the librarians and staff at the Krauth Memorial Library at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia.

The publication of this book could not have happened without the technical assistance of many people: Tresa Grauer, Kay Kodner, Leslie Rubin, and Gabriella Skwara. I thank the anonymous readers for Stanford University Press for their constructive criticism, and also press editors Norris Pope and Mariana Raykov. I am especially and deeply grateful to the academic editors of the Jewish History and Culture series at Stanford University Press, Aron Rodrigue and Steven Zipperstein, for their warm support and faith in this book.

My own family has played a crucial role in the making of this book. Long ago, my late aunt and uncle, Drs. Marjorie and Earl Hellerstein, helped me build my Yiddish library. My late in-laws, Dr. Kurt and Florence Stern, taught me much about traditional Judaism. My siblings, David, Jonathan, Daniel, Susan, and Beth, as well as their spouses and children, have kept me on track with their humor and companionship.

My dedication of this book to my parents, husband, and children speaks for itself. My loving gratitude to them is beyond words.

Introduction

This book is about tradition. But even more than tradition itself, it is about the questions surrounding tradition. The tradition I focus on in this book is that of Yiddish poetry written by women. Yet there are many questions pertaining to this particular body of work, including: Do these poems constitute a tradition of poetry? Did women poets write with an awareness of creating within or outside of a tradition? And perhaps, most important of all, of what does this tradition consist? And what value or profit lies in using it as a critical category?

As a critical category in modern literary cultures, tradition is ubiquitous. The notions of tradition in both T. S. Eliot’s 1919 essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent, and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s 1983 book, The Invention of Tradition, have gained wide currency, if not acceptance. Both Eliot and Hobsbawm have accustomed us to the understanding that every tradition is invented and serves a purpose. Eliot argues that tradition and modern poetry are mutually dependent: Poetry invents the tradition from which it emerges, because the dead inform the living, and the living reformulate the dead.¹ Accordingly, the traditional writer transcends time by means of a historical sense, and the value of an individual talent is attributed to its context. The poet, Eliot says, is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious not of what is dead, but of what is already living.² Hobsbawm provides a broad definition of what he calls invented tradition as it relates to group or national identity: a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with . . . a suitable historic past.³

Concepts of literary and national tradition such as these also pertain to the study of modern Yiddish literature. For example, the Israeli scholar Chone Shmeruk discusses Itzik Manger’s 1935 adaptations of biblical characters in his Khumesh-lider (Bible Poems) in terms of Eliot’s idea of the necessary reciprocity of the past and the present in poetry. Shmeruk also identifies the source of Manger’s reinvented archaic verse forms: scholarly studies of Old Yiddish literature in the late 1920s.⁴

Eliot’s and Hobsbawm’s notions of tradition deeply inform my discussion throughout this book. Eliot’s notion of a modern poet’s relation to tradition has led me to ask whether or how texts of Jewish religious practice, which defined women’s roles in Jewish life, are manifest in both Old and Modern Yiddish poetry by women. Hobsbawm’s definition of tradition also brings me to the very different question of how poetry written by women in the twentieth century was received by their male colleagues at the moment when these male poets and critics were inventing a modern tradition for Yiddish literature. In considering these questions of tradition in Yiddish poetry written by women, I hope to uncover the purposes for which tradition was invented, how this invention enabled women to write Yiddish poetry, and to what degree it is still a useful critical category.

To a large extent, this is a book about a book: Ezra Korman’s 1928 anthology of women Yiddish poets. In Yidishe dikhterins: Antologye (Yiddish Women Poets: Anthology), Korman collected Yiddish poems by seventy women writers who published between 1586 and 1927. The earliest figures printed their poems within an all-encompassing religious context; the poets in the late nineteenth century reflected the emerging ideas of Jewish nationhood; and the twentieth-century poets composed in the milieu of radicalism, modernism, and historical trauma. From Korman’s collection, one might assume that in 1928 women poets held an accepted place in Yiddish literature. In fact, his volume was the first and only collection ever to be compiled in Yiddish to highlight the work of women poets and to suggest that they wrote within a tradition.⁵

In chapter 1, I discuss Korman’s anthology at length and particularly the problems it raises about the idea of a tradition of women writers in Yiddish. I revise Korman’s premise by showing the many discrete strands of tradition in which women poets participated. Literary culture in Yiddish was never monolithic, but the most prominent and influential writers and critics were men; women writing poetry in Yiddish were often unacknowledged. By studying key women who wrote poetry from many different perspectives, we can better understand how literary tradition played out its role in modern Yiddish culture.

The poets I present in this book wrote in a range of styles under many influences and on many subjects. Yet there is much to be gained by looking at how these women poets wrote in Yiddish about the particular experiences of women and, invariably, about the experiences of Jewish women. Even when some of these women wrote as though they were not Jewish, they made a statement about Jewishness just by writing in the Jewish language of Yiddish.

In this book, then, I do not try to define a single tradition within these works. Instead, I will show how multiple female voices wrote about being Jewish women poets. If there was a repeated strategy common to many, though not all, of these poems, it was the use of sacred parody, a term I have borrowed from David Roskies’s important book, Against the Apocalypse (1984). The classical example of sacred parody in Jewish literature, both in Yiddish and in Hebrew, is the anti-prayer, that is, a literary work that uses the religious conventions of prayer to deny the very efficacy and value of prayer. A writer will thus deny God’s authority by writing an anti-prayer addressed to that very God. Roskies’s particular interest is the subversive use of sacred parody in Jewish responses to national catastrophe, which deny the very existence of a meaningful tradition by using traditional forms. But women poets use this mode not only subversively but also constructively to reconstitute in a secular literature such devotional traditions as Yiddish tkhines, supplicatory prayers for women. Poems written in Poland in the 1920s by Kadya Molodowsky, Miriam Ulinover, and Roza Yakubovitsh, as well as poems written in America from the late 1940s onward by Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman, exemplify the strategy whereby lost or obsolete devotional traditions are reclaimed in poems that seem to reject tradition but actually reinvent it. Many of these poems place this dialogue with tradition into the voices of women protagonists, signifying the poets’ interest in the various ways that gender changes and shapes Jewish poetry.

However, poems of sacred parody form only one of many threads in the rich tapestry of poetry that women wrote. Some poets, for example, Rokhl Korn, Celia Dropkin, and Anna Margolin, wrote poetry unconnected to sacred parody or, it seems, to any form of traditional Judaism. Korn’s poems of the dorf (country village) raise issues of class and religious identity by evoking relationships between Christian peasants and the few Jews who lived among them. Many of Korn’s village poems, as well as her poems of the city, depict characters who encounter problems particular to women, such as pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood, sisterhood, and abortion. Dropkin’s erotic poems rarely mention Jewish themes or images, much less social or political issues. But in their unabashed sexual explicitness these poems allude to traditional Jewish strictures governing women’s modesty against which Dropkin rebels. When Margolin’s modernist poems borrow tropes from classical Greek, Roman, and even Christian cultures, the poet often places these allusions and references within a rhetoric of devotion, whether to pagan deities or to some version of the Jewish God. Moreover, these poems repeatedly raise questions about women’s lives, their places in Jewish culture, and their forms of creativity. Not all poems written by women can be understood from a single perspective.

Over the past twenty-five years, many scholars have published studies of poetry in Yiddish by women from a variety of critical perspectives. Building on this earlier work, this book is the first to consider a major corpus of women poets, both premodern and modern. Most previous scholarship has focused on women writers in the modern period. The first essay published in English on women poets in Yiddish, Norma Fain Pratt’s overview of the careers of some fifty women writers, appeared in 1980.⁶ My articles on women poets began to appear in 1988.⁷ In 1990 Avraham Novershtern published the first serious article on Anna Margolin as a modernist.⁸ Shortly thereafter, two collections—Sokoloff, Lerner, and Norich’s Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (1992) and Baskin’s Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing (1994)—included essays on women Yiddish poets and writers by Anita Norich, Dan Miron, Janet Hadda, Norma Fain Pratt, and me, as well as a translation of a 1913 essay by Shmuel Niger.⁹ Sheva Zucker published articles on individual women poets between 1991 and 1996.¹⁰ In 1994 Irena Klepfisz published two important essays that took a feminist critical approach to focus on gender politics in the Yiddish language and culture as well as on a number of women prose writers’ involvement in the Bundist, socialist, and communist movements before World War II.¹¹ More recent writers have focused on modernism in the poetry of both Margolin (Barbara Mann and Naomi Brenner) and Rikuda Potash (Yael Chaver); the reception of the work of Esther Segal and Ida Maze (Rebecca Margolis); and gender and sex in the poetry of Tussman (Aviva Tal) and Dropkin (Kathryn Hellerstein).¹² In subsequent articles of my own, I have considered the poetry of Molodowsky, Ulinover, Yakubovitsh, Korn, and others in the context of Jewish tradition. Works of scholarship that treat female premodern or Old Yiddish writers include Chava Turniansky’s groundbreaking article on the girl-poet Gele (known by only this single name) and her definitive critical edition and Hebrew translation, Glikl: Memoirs 1691–1719, Chava Weissler’s foundational book on the tkhines, Devra Kay’s study of a tkhine collection, and Jerold Frakes’s extensive edition of Old Yiddish texts.¹³ Neither these works nor the significant monographs on topics related to women Yiddish writers, both modern and premodern—for example, Janet Hadda’s psychoanalytic assessment of suicide in Yiddish fiction and Naomi Seidman’s book on cultural gendering of literature in Hebrew and Yiddish—deal primarily with poetry.¹⁴ The eminent books on modernist Yiddish poetry—Ruth Wisse’s A Little Love in Big Manhattan (1988) and Chana Kronfeld’s On the Margins of Modernism (1996)—considered primarily male poets.

Perhaps the major achievement in laying groundwork for the reclamation of women Yiddish poets has been the publication of editions of their works, either in translation or in Yiddish, in recent decades: two volumes of poems by Rokhl Korn (Generations, edited by Seymour Mayne [1982], and Paper Roses, translated by Seymour Levitan [1985]); a scholarly edition of the Yiddish poems of Anna Margolin’s Lider, edited by Avraham Novershtern (1991); English translations of poems by Malka Heifetz Tussman (With Teeth in the Earth, translated by Marcia Falk [1992]); a Yiddish-English bilingual edition of poems by Rukhl Fishman (I Want to Fall Like This, translated by Seymour Levitan [1994]); a Yiddish-French bilingual edition of poems by Celia Dropkin (Dans le vent chaud, translated by Gilles Rozier and Viviane Siman [1994]); my own English-Yiddish bilingual edition of Kadya Molodowsky’s poems (Paper Bridges [1999]); Natalia Krynicka and Batia Baum’s bilingual French-Yiddish edition of Miriam Ulinover’s poetry (A grus fun der alter heym: lider [2003]); Shirley Kumove’s bilingual English-Yiddish edition of Anna Margolin’s poems (Drunk from the Bitter Truth [2005]); and Goldie Morgentaler’s English edition of Chava Rosenfarb’s selected poems (Exile at Last [2013]). Along with these books of poetry, four translated collections of Yiddish prose writings by women have appeared: Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers, edited by Frieda Forman, Ethel Raicus, Sarah Silberstein Swartz, and Margie Wolfe (1994); Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars, edited by Sandra Bark (2003); Arguing with the Storm, edited by Rhea Tregebov (2008); and The Exile Book of Yiddish Women Writers, edited by Frieda Johles Forman (2013). Through their cumulative presence, these disparate works of scholarship and translation have given rise to the question of whether or not there actually is a tradition of women’s poetry.

The single attempt to address this question directly is an ambitious, lengthy 2008 essay in Hebrew by Avraham Novershtern, The Voices and the Choir: Yiddish Women’s Poetry in the Interwar Period. In his essay, Novershtern raises many questions, but for our concerns, the most pertinent is his questioning of the use of women’s poetry as a critical category. Did this construction mean anything to the women when they were writing their poetry? Is this category useful today to appreciate and understand the poetry?

In exploring these questions, Novershtern makes several valuable points. He refutes the idea that women poets were stifled or that their writing was suppressed. Indeed, he argues that not only were women not excluded from the Yiddish literary scene but also that their general reception was positive and that women’s writing contributed to the the variegated nature of the national literature and culture even though its actual dimensions were more modest and limited.¹⁵ Novershtern also argues that women writers did not view themselves as women writers; and he claims that gender is not a central theme in most women writers’ poems and that they were more concerned with modernism or politics. In Novershtern’s view, each woman poet was a singular voice that had little in common with that of any other woman poet. Accordingly, he asserts, it is pointless to try to find a common Introduction denominator among these poets on the basis of gender. In Novershtern’s view, attempts by contemporary feminist scholars to identify a women’s tradition in Yiddish poetry only perpetuates the misconceptions and stereotypes held by male Yiddish critics who dismissed women writers, an acknowledgment that Novershtern makes, even though he believes that they were positively received.

Novershtern is certainly correct that there is no single tradition of women’s Yiddish poetry, no sole common denominator among women poets, and that the perspective of gender is not the only way to look at these poets. But the fact that there is not a single rubric for poetry written by women does not mean that looking at these poems from a gendered perspective or within the category of women’s experience is not valuable. The point of literary criticism is not to reduce poetry to a monolithic, quantifiable entity but to reveal its richness and multiple possibilities. The category of gender is not an end in itself. It is a means to reveal and discuss difference. The real question is not whether there is a single common denominator to all these poets and their works. Instead, the key question is: What were the many different ways to write about Jewish women’s experiences?

Novershtern’s assertion that women poets did not regard themselves as such is contradicted by evidence in six letters written to Ezra Korman in 1926 and 1927. Responding to Korman’s inquiries or invitations to submit work to Yidishe dikhterins, the anthology of women poets he was assembling at that time, four poets in Poland (Rokhl Korn, Miriam Ulinover, Roza Yakubovitsh, and Kadya Molodowsky) and two in New York (Malka Lee and Anna Margolin) each expressed an eagerness to participate and revealed her personal acquaintance with the other poets, familiarity with the poetry of other women, and a sense of herself as a woman poet.¹⁶

Novershtern tends to couch his argument in the hierarchical terms of centrality and marginality, of the major and the minor, which do not allow for a deep look at the poetry itself. As we all know, margins shift—the major can become the minor, and vice versa. None of these hierarchies is stable. Besides, what is the utility in judging these poems and their place within the larger space of Yiddish poetry before these poems have actually been read and studied? Few of them have. The point of this book is to look at as many poems as possible in order to assess the variety and breadth of this corpus of writing in its details. Only when we have a sense of the full range of these poems can we begin to make generalizations about them. As we will see, women poets did not write exclusively about being women, but they returned repeatedly to the experiences of being female and to the problems of expressing these experiences in Yiddish poetry. In this book I describe a world in which women found many different ways to write about themselves.

Although categories of feminist criticism and gender theory have informed my work, this is not a theoretical book. Rather, my focus is an extended reading of poems and poets. The book is divided into six chapters, organized both thematically and by individual poets. In each chapter, I address three questions: How did Yiddish poetry represent and interpret the roles and lifestyles that traditional Judaism assigned to women? How, in turn, did ideas about women’s sexuality and gender shape poems that women wrote? And, finally, how did the ways that the women writers responded to these questions in their poems change the very notion of tradition in modern Jewish literature?

In chapter 1, The Idea of a Literary Tradition, I argue for the centrality of women in the articulation of a modern literary tradition of Yiddish writing by American Yiddish poets and critics in the first part of the twentieth century. This concept of a Yiddish tradition, expressed in literary anthologies and manifestos of literary movements, centers, first, on establishing a heritage and historical continuity for Yiddish from the fifteenth or sixteenth century through the twentieth; and, second, on articulating a set of secular literary values that are distinct, yet not severed, from religious and folk sources. Through a comparison of two anthologies—Moyshe Bassin’s Antologye: Finf hundert yor yidishe poezye (Anthology: Five Hundred Years of Yiddish Poetry, 1917) and Ezra Korman’s Yidishe dikhterins (Yiddish Women Poets, 1928)—I maintain that the idea and the fact of women as writers played a key yet vexed role in the development of the idea of tradition. In a dialogue between these two anthologies, I highlight the ambivalence of Jewish textual tradition toward women as sexual beings, women in their demarcated gender roles, and women as readers and writers of Yiddish. The contradictory terms of this ambivalence come into stark contrast within Bassin’s and Korman’s anthologies, which, although defining the historical development of Yiddish poetry and attempting to establish a canon, repressed or sequestered writings by women.

Chapter 2, Old Poems in a Modern Anthology, picks up on the assumption initiated by Bassin and developed by Korman that the modern idea of a Yiddish literary tradition requires an acknowledgment of premodern textual roots. Although both anthologists began their collections with devotional poems, dating back to the fifteenth century (Bassin) and the sixteenth century (Korman), individually they strove to distinguish between these archaic works and the post-Enlightenment idea of literature that the twentieth-century poets embodied. For Korman in particular it seemed essential to dissociate the old-fashioned religious poems, which reeked of the oppressive shtetl world and especially the association of Yiddish itself with women’s devotions, from the poems of revolution and secularism in the new century. Also in chapter 2, I address the implications of Korman’s ambivalent inclusion in his anthology of four premodern women poets by focusing on the texts and what they reveal about the writers. In readings of six premodern Yiddish poets—Royzl Fishls; two young sisters, Ele and Gele; Hannah Katz (Khane Kats); Rivke Tiktiner; and Toybe Pan—I consider how verse-prayers by women frame the place of women poets in modern literary tradition. An analysis of these six poets reveals the variety of roles that women played as writers, readers, and publishers of Yiddish literature before the modern era.

In the subsequent chapters of this book, I investigate the possibility of constructing several literary traditions through a consideration of modern secular poetry by women in the context of the premodern devotional Yiddish poems discussed in chapter 2. This investigation makes explicit some of the implications inherent in Korman’s decision in his anthology to frame the twentieth-century women poets with the premodern poets. Prefacing modern poems with those of a previous era, Korman stresses the different concerns of poetic form and purpose. At the same time, this juxtaposition allows the cultural and societal issues of women’s lives and women’s roles as writers to surface as reiterated themes. A significant number of the modern poems explicitly or implicitly respond to traditional Jewish texts and other devotional sources with a noticeable attention to gender. And often the poets express such gender concerns in the context of the tension that runs throughout Jewish literature between individual and collective responsibilities of the Jewish writer.

Despite the range of genre, time, and place, and an array of distinctive voices, the writers of the premodern poems assume a faith in God and an unambiguous identification with the Jewish people in the arc of sacred history. In contrast, the women poets of the twentieth century struggle with the idea of lifting a post-Enlightenment individual from the gravitational pull of responsibility to the Jewish community. Although this struggle to establish an individual Jewish voice in relationship to the collective is central to the rise of modern Yiddish literature, it becomes explicitly gendered in poems written by women, whether textually or sexually. By textually I mean that some poets directly invoke the popular Yiddish devotional texts associated with women as poetic sources, which they either reject or adapt in their secular poems. By sexually I mean that other poets, seeking to define their work as purely secular, appear to eschew the devotional model that they nonetheless invoke through an emphasis in their poems on sexuality. By focusing on poems by women and some of their male contemporaries, from the 1920s onward, I examine the intersections between various modern poems and traditional sources. The complex interactions between the modern literary texts and the devotional models shaped the ideas of Yiddish poetic tradition.

In chapter 3, Revolution, Prayers, and Sisterhood in Interwar Poland, my discussion turns to a consideration of four women poets in Poland in the decade after World War I whose poetry expressly rejected the tenets of Jewish tradition and asserted the new values of political revolution, aesthetic modernism, and feminism. Yet even as they severed connections to tradition, the poems of Kadya Molodowsky, Dvore Fogel, Rikuda Potash, and Rokhl Korn reconfigured the ways that Jewish women related to texts and validated the subjectivity of women in Yiddish poetry. The chapter frames this discussion by comparing Ezra Korman’s ideological approach in anthologizing work by Molodowsky, Potash, and Korn with the poets’ own representation of their work.

In chapter 4, The Folk and the Book: Miriam Ulinover and Roza Yakubovitsh, I examine two women who appropriated the devotional mode and its traditional texts for women for modern and modernist poetry in Poland in the early 1920s. Ulinover’s deliberately archaic language and Yakubovitsh’s dramatic monologues of biblical women contributed to an unusual statement of the modern. With an urge to preserve the ephemeral oral culture of the Jewish folk, and particularly of women, Ulinover created a new cultural artifact, the literary folk poem. Through the dialogue between a modern granddaughter and her old-fashioned grandmother, Ulinover introduced a specifically female voice into modern Yiddish poetry. Roza Yakubovitsh focused on women’s topics—girlhood, marriage, motherhood, barrenness, widowhood—in the concrete imagery of the modern lyric to convey the physical and emotional experiences of girls and women living out roles they occupied in a traditional culture. Especially in her biblical monologues, Yakubovitsh rewrote the canonical models for Jewish women’s lives to create a powerfully gendered Jewish literary form.

Chapter 5, The Art of Sex: Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin, focuses on two poets whose work linked sexuality with poetic creativity. This chapter moves from Europe to America to consider women poets identified with modernist movements in New York—Di Yunge and Introspectivism—in the 1920s and 1930s. Tensions between the sensual and the procreative aspects of sexuality provided these two poets with tropes that freed their work from the devotional models sought by Ulinover and Yakubovitsh, their European contemporaries. Placing the poems of Dropkin and Margolin into the context of their lesser-known contemporaries (women poets Fradl Shtok and Berta Kling and male poets Zishe Landau, Reuven Iceland, and Moyshe-Leyb Halpern), I consider how the explicit sexuality of these modern women poets in New York conjured up the apparently erased Jewish tradition.

In chapter 6, Prayer-Poems against History: Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman, I consider the post-Holocaust work of two prolific poets in America. Molodowsky and Tussman shared an approach to writing secular poetry that engaged the question of prayer through a distinctive concern with gender. I examine how each poet depicted Jewish women in traditional and untraditional roles—as lovers, mothers, daughters, workers, and writers—as a response to the destruction of Jewish culture in Europe. Here I argue for the importance of gender in understanding the crisis of tradition and creativity faced by Yiddish poets writing after the Holocaust. Both Molodowsky and Tussman summoned metaphors of sexuality, gender, and prayer in order to assert their determination to continue writing poetry in Yiddish. Molodowsky depicted the poet as an aging woman who tells stories and blesses the candles to perpetuate Jewish tradition. In contrast, Tussman shifted her focus from the sexually charged relations between women and men and between mothers and children to those between a poet and God. She addressed the struggle to write by combining prayer with erotic desire and thus reinvented tradition as a source for continued creativity in Yiddish.

The book concludes with an appendix and six bibliographic essays. The appendix presents letters written to Ezra Korman in 1926 and 1927 by women whose poetry he was considering for inclusion in Yidishe dikhterins: Antologye. These letters reveal the involvement of these poets in the making of Korman’s anthology and the degree to which they identified as women writers. The bibliographic essays expand upon scholarly and other resources for the central figures discussed in chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6: Celia Dropkin, Anna Margolin, Kadya Molodowsky, Malka Heifetz Tussman, Miriam Ulinover, and Roza Yakubovitsh.

Every book has a story, and I will tell the story behind this book. I first encountered Yiddish poems written by women in 1978 or 1979, when I sat across from my teacher, Malka Heifetz Tussman, at the round dining-room table in her Berkeley apartment on Henry Street. A doctoral student at the time, I was struggling to translate one of Moyshe-Leyb Halpern’s bitterly irreverent poems for my dissertation. Malka, who had her own sense of dark humor, grew suddenly annoyed with what she called Halpern’s vulgarity as well as with my slavish concerns with the academic categories of literary study—modernism and Jewish American literature. She fixed me with her gaze and said, "Du darfst nit nor leyenen di lider fun Halpernen. Di froyen—mayne fraynt—Kadya Molodowsky, Tsilye Dropkin, Rokhl Korn—hobn azoy sheyn geshribn lider af yidish. S’iz geven zeyer shver far unz ale—keyn ‘dikhterins,’ nor take poetn—aroystsugebn unzere lider (You need to read more than the poems of just Halpern. The women, my friends Kadya Molodowsky, Celia Dropkin, Rokhl Korn, wrote poems in Yiddish so beautifully. It was extremely difficult for us all—not ‘poetesses’ but poets—to publish our poems").

Malka sent me to the low shelf near the radio where she kept her books of poetry, and I pulled out a thick, blue-bound volume, Yidishe dikhterins: Antologye. Malka leafed through the book until she came to the first of Molodowsky’s Froyen-lider (women-poems). She pushed the open book across the table. "Leyen! she commanded me. Read!"

One

The Idea of a Literary Tradition

*

In 1928, Ezra Korman (1888–1959), a poet, teacher, and literary critic, published a volume of Yiddish poems by women, Yidishe dikhterins: Antologye (Yiddish Women Poets: Anthology).¹ Clothbound, lavishly illustrated, and replete with introductions, notes, and bibliographies, this book collected poems by seventy women who published between 1586 and 1927. The earliest figures represented in Korman’s anthology wrote popular devotional poetry in Krakow and Prague. The post-Haskalah poets in the late nineteenth century wrote on national and social themes, adapting metaphorically the images and conventions of devotional literature. The modern poets of the 1910s and 1920s composed lyrics in America and in the Soviet Union under the influences of cosmopolitan modernism and socialism. From the evidence of Korman’s collection, a reader might conclude that in 1928 women poets occupied an acknowledged and significant place in Yiddish literature and that there existed unambiguously a tradition of women writing poems in Yiddish. In fact, Korman’s anthology set out to argue the case for such a tradition. But he was shouting into the wind.

Only a decade earlier, Korman’s contemporaries—the Yiddish modernists in the United States—had engaged in their own attempt to establish a literary tradition for Yiddish poetry. Anthologies were their tools. In his Antologye: di yidishe dikhtung in amerike biz yor 1919 (Anthology: Yiddish Poetry in America until 1919), published in New York in 1919, Yunge poet Zishe Landau (1889–1937) asserted the criteria for a consciously modern and aesthetic Yiddish poetry in revolt against the didacticism of national and social poetry. One year later, the newly self-proclaimed Introspectivist poets Yankev (Jacob) Glatshteyn (1896–1971), A. Leyeles (1889–1966), and Nokhem-Borekh Minkoff (1893–1958) published In zikh: a zamlung introspektive lider (In the Self: A Collection of Introspectivist Poems), an anthology advocating an even more radical challenge to the poetic use of language, form, and individual voice. In each of these works, the editors selected poems to challenge the late-nineteenth-century conventions of the labor poets, with the belief that Yiddish poetry must serve the collective good of the Jews. As innovative as these collections were, they focused on poetry of the contemporary moment, published as the 1920s commenced. Several years into that decade, Ezra Korman decided to compile an anthology of his own. Although he had been an advocate of avant-garde poetry in Europe, the anthology on which Korman modeled his Yidishe dikhterins was not one of the modernists’ manifestos but rather a historical anthology of 1917, compiled by the poet Moyshe Bassin (1889–1963). The deluxe two-volume Antologye: Finf hundert yor yidishe poezye (Anthology: Five Hundred Years of Yiddish Poetry) represented poets in Yiddish from 1410 through 1910, in what Bassin claimed was a strict chronological order.² Bassin’s anthology was successful enough that it came out in a second edition in 1922.³ In contrast to the modernist anthologizers’ arguments for artistic individuality, Bassin emphasized the collective obligation of the Yiddish poet.

A comparison of Bassin’s and Korman’s collections of Yiddish poetry shows how anthologies defined competing literary traditions for a newly self-conscious Yiddish poetry. Each work established a heritage and historical continuity for Yiddish from the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries, and they also articulated secular literary values distinct, yet not severed, from religious and folk sources. Taking Bassin’s collection of mostly male poets as the model for his anthology of women poets, Korman sought to elevate and augment the place of women within Yiddish literary history, counteracting the trend among his contemporaries to contain or diminish writings by women.

In the tumultuous literary environment of Yiddish New York in 1917, where writers sought out the new and the modern, Bassin’s anthology looked backward in order to define a literary tradition for avant-garde writers. Through scholarly collecting, he endeavored to establish the historical continuity of Yiddish writing from earlier periods to his present moment. The first volume of Bassin’s two-volume anthology encompasses Yiddish poetry from 1410 through 1885. This volume begins with the opening poem, Shabes-lid (Sabbath Song), by Reb Zelmelin, who died around 1456, and continues through the folklike poems of A. M. Sharkanski, who immigrated to the United States in 1887. In an intellectual atmosphere where the religious and folk roots of Jewish culture aroused ambivalence if not outright antagonism among his fellow immigrants, Bassin complicated the idea of a straightforward chronological tradition by including religious and folk materials alongside secular belles-lettres. The first volume of the anthology contains three parts. In part one, Bassin offers a selection of Yiddish prayers. The second part contains folksongs, which, as Bassin explains in his introduction, are universally considered the oldest form, the root of poetry, although in Yiddish, he asserts, they are predated by fifteenth-century written verse—acrostics, devotionals, and love poems. By claiming that these obscure printed devotions and popular folksongs are its sources, Bassin argued that the secular Yiddish poetry of the nineteenth century (included in the anthology’s third section) was contiguous with the religious and folk past, even as it proclaimed its difference from those premodern genres. The scholarly apparatus—a glossary of archaic Yiddish words found in the poems and bibliographic and linguistic notes on the poetry—strengthens these claims of contiguous distinction.

The second volume of Bassin’s anthology presents the modern period in a single, chronological sweep. It begins in the 1890s with the labor poet Morris Rosenfeld and ends with poems by Moyshe Bassin himself, who was 28 years old in 1917. Both volumes included biographical notes on individual poets, portraits of the poets by S. Zagat, and decorative illustrations by Y. Likhtenshteyn and Zuni Maud.

Bassin’s opening remarks to the first volume indicate that he intends his anthology to be as inclusive and representative of all the kinds of Yiddish poetry as possible, although he stopped short of including every single person who has ever jotted down a couple of verses.⁴ His collaborator, Ber Borokhov (1881–1917), developed the anthology’s thesis even more explicitly in his brief but scholarly introductory essay. There, Borokhov argued that Bassin’s anthology would ensure that the Yiddish muse would not be left orphaned and vulnerable to the works of mere dilettantes, for it would present the classical tradition of Yiddish poetry. By stressing the idea that each individual poet has a place in the overall development of a collective Yiddish tradition, Borokhov contradicted the Yunge ideal of individualism in the poetic voice. In Borokhov’s view, a poet’s intent, however individualistic or even iconoclastic, was subsumed by the writer’s participation in promoting the overall good. Borokhov’s idea of the Yiddish poet’s accountability to the Jewish people contrasted with the discriminating modernist ideas of a Yiddish poetic tradition that were circulating well before 1917 and would soon be formalized by Di Yunge and Introspectivist anthologies. Such an emphasis on the cultural collective corresponds to the labor poets’ socialism and Jewish nationalism, ideologies that the modernist poets rejected. The idea of literary tradition that Borokhov stated and that Bassin’s anthology embodied was a political and nationalistic statement about the purpose of Yiddish poetry. In this scheme, poetry served the greater ends of peoplehood and national culture. This emphasis stood in opposition to the ideas of poetry that were driving the avant-garde poets of that moment.

These three anthologies—namely, those edited by the Yunge poet Landau, by the Introspectivists Glatshteyn, Leyeles, and Minkoff, and by the literary historian Bassin—represented few women poets. Landau included two, Fradl Shtok (1890–ca. 1952) and Celia Dropkin (1887–1956). The 1920 Introspectivist anthology featured eight male poets and no women,⁵ although the first issue of the In zikh journal (also published in 1920) began with two poems by Celia Dropkin, the sole woman writer published there.⁶ From 500 years of Yiddish writing, Bassin included a total of nine women poets: Gele (born 1702), Yehudis (pseudonym for Rokhl Bernshteyn) (1869–?), Roza Yakubovitsh (1889–1942), Zelda Knizshnik (1869–?), Anna Rappaport (1870 or 1876–?), Paula R. (pseudonym for Pearl Rozental Pryłucki) (1876–1941), Sarah Reyzen (1885–?), Roza Goldshteyn (1870–?), and Fradl Shtok (1888–1952). From this list, a reader might conclude that just one woman wrote poetry before the late nineteenth century and that only eight others had written poetry after that.

It was to address this misconception that Ezra Korman began work on his anthology in 1925 or 1926, Yidishe dikhterins, which assessed the actual contribution of women poets to Yiddish literature.⁷ A contemporary of Landau, Glanz, and Bassin, all of whom had come to the United States before 1910, Korman remained active in the literary scene in Kiev, Warsaw, and Berlin until he immigrated to the United States in 1923.⁸ Korman himself was a teacher,⁹ a literary critic,¹⁰ a bibliographer, a translator, a poet,¹¹ and the editor of two previous anthologies of Ukrainian Yiddish poetry, focused on the theme of revolution.¹²

In his first American anthological effort, though, Korman shifted his agenda from the politics of the Russian Revolution to the sexual revolution. Was it with irony or adulation that Korman modeled his anthology of women Yiddish poets on Bassin’s anthology? Although one might be tempted to view Korman’s collection of women poets as a radical correction to Bassin’s male-dominated canon, one might also see it as a tribute and an enriching supplement to Bassin’s tradition-building. In his introduction, Korman states his intention to establish the place of women poets in the tradition of Yiddish writing, but he does not claim to be original, and in copious footnotes he credits others whose recent works had brought to light literate and literary women. Seeking to ground contemporary Yiddish culture in a centuries-long history of Yiddish literature, these publications included the first literary encyclopedia of Yiddish literature by Zalman Reyzen in 1914 Warsaw (Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur un prese [Lexicon of Yiddish Literature and Press]); scholarly essays, such as Max Erik’s 1926 Brantshpigl: Di entsiklopedye fun der yidisher froy in zibetstn yorhundert (Brantshpigl: The Encyclopedia of the Jewish Woman in the Seventeenth Century);¹³ and Shmuel Niger’s 1913 article Di Yidishe literatur un di lezerin (Yiddish Literature and the Female Reader). In Korman’s eyes, Bassin’s 1917 historical anthology proved a 500-year legacy and shared with these works the assumption that Yiddish writing of the early twentieth century would gain legitimacy in the view of modern world literature if it could prove its roots in a medieval past. Korman followed this model. By discussing at length the textual and bibliographical variants of the oldest poems, which his anthology shared with Bassin’s, Korman acknowledged his debt to his predecessor and marked his collection as part of an anthological tradition.¹⁴

Korman’s anthology resembles Bassin’s anthology in its massiveness, its chronological span, its format, and its apparatus. But Korman improves upon Bassin materially. The first edition of Bassin’s anthology was visually impressive; the book was bound in boards and imprinted with a stunning, folklike, four-color graphic design by Y. Likhten-shteyn. Korman’s anthology was even better. It was clothbound, in dark blue with gilded lettering; the blue dust jacket matched the end-papers, and it was imprinted with black graphics by Todres Geler in the style of Russian Formalism. Because Korman used higher-quality materials than Bassin, Korman’s binding remains sturdy today, whereas the Bassin volumes are now extremely fragile. The Bassin volumes featured S. Zagat’s sketched portraits of each poet. But Korman, utilizing the more advanced and expensive printing technology of zincography, tipped in photographs of each modern poet as well as facsimile reproductions of significant pages from some of the original books of poems. Examples included the first and last pages of Toybe Pan’s seventeenth-century poem (a prayer for God’s mercy in time of plague), along with a variant version of that poem, and a photomontage of title pages of modern poetry books.¹⁵ Although Bassin’s anthology had an alphabetical index of authors at the end of each volume, Korman’s opened with an eleven-page table of contents at the beginning of the book and ended with separate alphabetical indexes of the authors, their poems, and a list of their pseudonyms. Whereas the total texts of Bassin’s A Few Words, Borokhov’s introductory essay, and his concluding Linguistic and Bibliographic Comments on the poems consisted of only 18 pages in the two volumes, Korman’s introductory essay alone was 38 pages long, including footnotes. His 35-page section of biographies and a bibliography of 232 titles established the scholarly heft and depth of Korman’s volume.

Divided into two main sections, Sources and Literature, Korman’s bibliography lists books of poems by individual writers; anthologies; handbooks; collections and periodical publications; studies and literary histories; articles and reviews; a bibliography of Old Yiddish literature; and translations of Yiddish poems by women into Hebrew, English, and Polish. With this bibliography, Korman accomplishes several tasks. First, by documenting the sources for all the writers in his anthology, Korman establishes his own credentials and the validity of his research. Second, he shows how widely published these poets were in their contemporary culture. Third, he establishes the range of the audience for works by these women poets, as they appeared in anthologies, specialized collections of literary movements, political and literary journals, daily newspapers, and even a short-lived weekly journal for women titled Froyen zshournal-vokhenblat (Women’s Journal-Weekly).¹⁶ These various works were published both in the centers of Yiddish culture, such as New York, Montreal, Warsaw, Vilna, Moscow, Kiev, and Lodz, and in more remote places, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and Cape Town. Fourth, Korman provides an invaluable tool for future readers of Yiddish literature long after most of the ephemeral publications, such as newspapers and journals, have been discarded along with many of the Yiddish books themselves.

We can read the bibliography for a portrait of the book’s own time, when women generally lagged behind men in the publication of books. For instance, Korman lists thirteen books of poems by individual writers¹⁷ and 126 entries under collections and periodical publications. These two lists show that by 1928 women poets had published a relatively small number of books, but they had contributed more prolifically to periodicals.¹⁸ In contrast, during this same period, a much larger number of poetry books had been published by men. Although many of the younger male modernists had published two or more books of poems,¹⁹ their female counterparts had as of then published no books. Two of the women whose poems regularly appeared in the American Yunge and Introspectivist journals—Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin—published only a single volume of poetry each during their lifetimes. Other women who had brought out one book were prevented by economic or political circumstances from publishing another. Korman describes manuscripts of second books by two women poets in Poland—Miriam Ulinover and Roza Yakubovitsh—as completed but not yet in print. Expected to appear after 1940, these two manuscripts vanished during the Nazi occupation of Poland.²⁰ Although women poets actively wrote and published, they were less visible on the literary scene than men.

The introduction to Yidishe dikhterins set forth Korman’s ideological position. By presenting modern Yiddish poetry by women (or the modern women-poetry [der moderner froyen-dikhtung]), alongside examples of the works of women writers (froyen-farfasterins) who wrote in what he called variously and somewhat inaccurately Yidish-taytsh (Judeo-German) or di eltere yidishe literatur (Old Yiddish literature),²¹ Korman hoped to show the parallel between the nascent vernacular Jewish literature in the sixteenth century, which marked the beginning of a new epoch of Jewish life, and the current period, in which the buds of that early period had blossomed. Yet although Korman emphasized the creativity of women, old and new, his introduction was at the same time ambivalent and contradictory. Korman explicitly denied that a continuous poetic tradition of women poets existed, even while he implied a line of influence between the early and later periods. He considered the Yiddish poetry of the early modern period for, and presumably by, women as immeasurably huge and incomparable, and he thought that modern poetry by women was a mere thin thread continuing that heritage that still affected the new women poets. Korman argued that Old Yiddish literature had an abiding influence over the modern poets because no single, great modern voice had appeared to restructure the relationship of the new to the old. Significantly, although Korman stated that the old literature of women in Yiddish outweighed the new, his selections in the anthology reversed this judgment: the sixty-six modern poets vastly outnumber the four examples of the premodern writers.

Korman considered contemporary women’s literature a positive development for the growth of Yiddish literature and culture in general, asking, Who can prophesy what our future female creativity bears within itself and for the literature?²² The language of this question suggests that the unique creativity of women corresponds to the processes of biological productivity. In the verb trogn mit (to carry, to bear), in a general sense and specifically in relation to childbearing, Korman drew an analogy between the making of poems and the making of babies, both of which are froyen-shafung (women’s creation). Curiously, this analogy attempted not only to characterize women’s poetry as having a special nature that distinguished it from poetry written by men but also to stereotype and thereby limit it. Feminist literary theorists of the latter part of the twentieth century have explored the complexities in likening writing to pregnancy, but in 1928, when Korman’s volume was the first compilation of Yiddish poetry by women as an entity unto itself, this analogy served as a point of departure for a critic to classify poetry by women in either elevated or