Kadya Molodowsky

Kadya Molodowsky

Kadya Molodowsky ( May 10, 1894 in Bereza Kartuska , Russian Empire - March 23, 1975 in Philadelphia , United States ; also: Kadia Molodowsky, Yiddish: קאַדיע מאָלאָדאָווסקי) was a teacher and writer who published six volumes of Yiddish poetry in the course of her life . Molodowsky is one of the most important Yiddish poets of the mid-20th century.

It appeared on the literary scene in interwar Poland within the pulsating secular Yiddish Warsaw . Some of her light poems have been turned into songs and sung in Yiddish schools around the world. Molodowsky also wrote novels, short stories, and plays. In 1935 she emigrated from Poland to the USA. There she could continue to write and publish in Yiddish. She was also the editor of two international Yiddish literary magazines, Heym (home) and Svive (environment).

biography

Kadya Molodowsky was born in the shtetl Bereza Kartuska , in today 's Brest Oblast in Belarus , at that time in the Russian Empire, and enjoyed a religious and secular education at home. She was the second of four children; her father taught in the local cheder , her mother Itke ran a dry goods store and later opened a factory producing kvass . She learned to read and write Yiddish from her paternal grandmother, Bobe Shifre, and her father taught her Hebrew and Torah . He was also an admirer of the Haskala , and an admirer of Montefiores and Herzl . He hired Russian teachers to teach Kadya the Russian language, geography, philosophy and history.

From 1911 to 1913, after receiving a teaching certificate at the age of 18, she taught in Sherpetz and Bialystok , where she also joined a group for the revival of Hebrew . She then studied until 1914 to become a Hebrew teacher. When the First World War broke out, she worked in a day care center for refugee Jewish children run by her teacher Yehiel Halperin in Warsaw. She continued this work in various locations until 1917. In the summer of 1916 she and Halperin moved to Odessa to escape the war front and taught in a kindergarten there. At the same time she continued her education; she studied to become a primary school teacher.

In 1917, after the October Revolution , she was unable to return to her parents, so she stayed in Kiev , where she again took up a job as a teacher. When she survived the pogrom in Kiev in 1920 , she published her first poem. In Kiev she also met Simkhe Lev, whom she married in 1921. The two lived in Warsaw until 1935, with the exception of a brief period around 1923 when they taught in Brest-Litovsk. In Warsaw, Molodowsky taught in two schools at the same time, during the day in the Yidishe Shul Organizatsye (TsYShO) elementary school and in the community school in the evening. She was also active in Farayn fun Yidishe Literatn un Shurnalistn in Warshe at 13 Tlomatske Street.

In 1927 Molodowsky was able to publish her first book, Kheshvendike Nekht ("Nights of the Month Kheshvan"), with the Yiddish publisher Kletskin in Warsaw. The novel received almost 20 reviews, almost exclusively of praise. In it, a woman in her 30s travels through Eastern Europe, contrasting her own modern position with that of traditional women's roles and ways of life.

With Geyen Shikhelekh Avek. Mayselekh ("Shoes go away. Little stories"), in 1930 she dealt with the deep poverty in which many of her students lived. The band received an award from the Warsaw Jewish Community and the Yiddish Pen Club.

Molodowsky's third book, her volume of poetry Dzshike Gas  ("Dzshike Straße"), was published in 1933 by the publisher of Warsaw's most important literary magazine, Literarishe Bleter , but received negative reviews because her poetry was considered "too aesthetic". Her fourth book,  Freydke  (1935), is a heroic epic of a Jewish middle-class woman in narrative poetry.

In 1935 she moved to New York, her husband moved to 1937 or 1938. Her fifth book was published there in 1937, In Land fun Mayn Gebayn ("In the land of my bones"). In it she addresses the internalization of exile in fragmentary poems. From then on, her work in New York flourished. In 1938 she was able to reissue her children's poems with Afn Berg , and in 1942 she published the novel Fun Lublin Biz Nyu-York. Togbukh fun Rivke Zilberg ("From Lublin to New York. Diary of Rivke Zilberg"). At the same time, she wrote in Forvert's columns on women in Jewish history under the pseudonym Rivke Zilberg, the protagonist of her novel. In 1943-4 she co-edited Svive , a literary magazine that she had co-founded.

Concerned about her family in Poland, however, she gave up her editorial work and turned to writing the cycle of poems The Melekh Dovid Aleyn Iz Geblibn ("Only King David is left").

In 1945 her children's poems were reprinted, both in New York in Yiddish and in Tel Aviv in Hebrew, where their poems  had been translated by Lea Goldberg , Nathan Alterman , Fanya Bergshteyn , Avraham Levinson , and Yakov Faykhman . She published a long poem,  Donna Gracia Mendes ; a play,  Nokhn Got fun Midbar  ("After the God of the Desert"; 1949), which was performed in Chicago and Israel; a collection of poems In Yerushalayim Kumen Malokhim  (" Angels Come In Jerusalem"; 1952); and an essay book,  Af di Vegn fun Tsion  ("On the Streets of Zion") and a collection of short stories,  A Shtub with Zibn Fentster  ("A House with 7 Windows"), both published in 1957 in New York. She also edited the Shoah poetry collection  Lider fun Khurbn  (1962). In the 1950s she revived the literary magazine Svive .

From 1948 to 1952 Molodowsky and Simkhe Lev lived in Tel Aviv , where they published a magazine for women pioneers, Heym . Molodowsky started there at the Roman Baym Toyer. Roman fun dem Lebn in Yisroel   ("At the gate. A novel from life in Israel"; 1967) to work and also started her autobiography, Fun Mayn Elter-zeydns Yerushe ("From the legacy of my great-grandfather"), which in Svive as Series appeared between March 1965 and April 1974.

In 1965 her last volume of poetry, Likht fun Dornboym ("Light of the thorn bush"), was published in Buenos Aires.

In 1971, Molodowsky was awarded the Itzik Manger Prize in Tel Aviv for her achievements in Yiddish poetry, the most coveted global prize for Yiddish literature. Molodowsky died in a Philadelphia home in 1975.

literature

• Christina Pareigis: From Warsaw to New York. The poetic passages of the poet Kadya Molodowsky, Convivium . Germanistic Yearbook Poland 2011, published by DAAD , pp. 79–97 full text, opening credits also in Polish

credentials

1. ↑ Hellerstein, Kathryn (March 20, 2009). " Kadya Molodowsky ." Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia . The Jewish Women's Archive. Retrieved from www.jwa.org on April 16, 2016.
2. ^ " Kadya Molodowsky (1894-1975) ." Jewish Heritage Online Magazine . Excerpt from: Kathryn Hellerstein, "Introduction," in  Paper Bridges: Selected Poems of Kadya Molodowsky  (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999). Retrieved April 16, 2016.
3. ↑ Braun, Alisa (2000). "(Re) Constructing the Tradition of Yiddish Women's Poetry." Review of  Paper Bridges: Selected Poems of Kadya Molodowsky , by Moldowsky and Kathryn Hellerstein. Proof texts . Vol. 20, no. 3, p. 372-379; here: p. 372.
4. ↑ ^{a b} Klepfisz, Irena (1994). "Di Mames, dos Loshn / the Mothers, the Language: Feminism, Yidishkayt, and the Politics of Memory." Bridges . Vol. 4, no. 1, p. 12-47; here: p. 34.
5. ↑ Liptzin, Sol, and Kathryn Heller Stein (2007). "Molodowsky, Kadia." Encyclopaedia Judaica . 2nd ed. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA. Vol. 14, p. 429-430.
6. ^ Hellerstein, Kathryn (September 2, 2010). " Molodowsky, Kadia ." YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe . Retrieved April 16, 2016.
7. ↑ Hellerstein, Kathryn (2003). " Kadya Molodowsky ." In: S. Lillian Kremer (Ed.),  Holocaust Literature . Vol. 2. New York: Routledge. p. 869-873; here: p. 870.
8. ↑ ^{a b c} Hellerstein, Kathryn (March 20, 2009). " Kadya Molodowsky ." Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia . The Jewish Women's Archive. Retrieved from www.jwa.org on April 16, 2016.