[In the following essay, Pratt presents a brief history of Jewish and Yiddish female writers whose works appeared in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, noting that their writing is reflective of the social issues they were confronting.]

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the cultural traditions East European Jewish immigrants brought with them to America were fundamentally recast, yet few cultural historians have considered the extent to which these transformations were an expression of class and gender. This study, based on the lives of some fifty Yiddish women writers whose extensive literary works appeared in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, confronts diversity, class difference, and especially gender as sources of change in American Jewish life.¹

All of the women under consideration came from the poorer classes of East European Jewry. A few were daughters of impoverished merchant families; others were raised in an artisan environment; but most came from the proletarianized Jewish classes of recently industrialized Russian Poland and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Their parents, particularly their mothers, were barely literate. While few of these women received advanced formal education either in Eastern Europe or in America, in the New World they became journalists, poets, short story writers, and novelists, representing a first generation of Jewish women, immigrant and poor, who interpreted their own lives in their own language.

Emigrating mainly in the years between 1905 and 1920 and settling in large urban centers (New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles), they wrote exclusively in Yiddish for audiences who still communicated primarily in that language. The Jewish anarchist, socialist, Yiddish avant-garde, and, later in the 1920s and 1930s, the Jewish communist presses regularly accepted the literary work of these women, whose writing dealt primarily with female, Jewish, and working-class immigrant issues rather than political concerns. Along with their male counterparts, these writers were spokeswomen for a politically radical Jewish subculture that existed within the general American Jewish society but at the same time possessed its own outlook and its own political, social, and cultural institutions. This distinctive Jewish subculture, consisting mainly of needle trades workers, small businesspeople, clerks, students, teachers, and artists, represented one form of secular Jewish existence in America. These people were known as the veltlikhe yidn (“secular Jews”): the radikaln of the Jewish Left. They rejected Orthodox Judaism with its rituals and rabbinical leadership and in its place accepted a Jewish identity, yiddishkeit, that was committed to the preservation of the Yiddish language, the celebration of historic Jewish holidays, and the cultivation of Jewish loyalties. Their yiddishkeit also included a special devotion to the Jewish working class, the international working class, and America, their adopted home. Committed to the creation of a distinct Jewish society as part of a culturally pluralistic society in America, they wanted to be American without assimilating; they wished to express politically radical ideals, especially in matters social and economic; and they hoped to remain Yiddish speakers and cultural Jews.

In the ideological paradigm of the secular radicals, these diverse goals and loyalties did not seem contradictory. Rather, with these purposes in mind, this Jewish subculture created Jewish radical political parties (the Anarchists, the socialist Verband, the Communist International Workers' Order, the Zionist-socialist Po'ale Zion) that in turn maintained Yiddish newspapers (Tsukunft, Fraye arbeter shtime), Yiddish literary journals (Brikn, Signal, Hamer), literary-political discussion groups, choruses, mutual insurance groups, drama clubs, recreational camps, children's Yiddish schools, and summer camps. It was an immigrants' society and an immigrants' dream that attracted thousands of people, at its center and at its margins, for several decades from the end of the nineteenth century until at least the fourth decade of the twentieth century. Women were an active force in creating and maintaining its institutions, and Yiddish women writers were the visible and vocal representatives of their gender.²

Yet those same women writers, although an important group, were also isolated from men and from each other. Their participation in the radical Yiddishist culture was not the same as male participation. Although members of the same anarchist, socialist, or communist parties and contributors to the same newspapers and journals, women writers functioned differently from men within the institutional structure of Jewish radical society. The hundreds of volumes of their fiction and nonfiction remain a distinct body of literature that documents, articulates, and serves as a guide for understanding the perceptions of an entire generation of immigrant women who came of age in the United States before the Second World War.

Had the fifty immigrant writers under discussion remained in Europe, they might have had some opportunity for educational and literary development, since East European Jewish society was becoming increasingly secularized at the turn of the century. Girls attended gymnasium; some even took higher degrees at the university level.³ A vital Yiddish literature was also developing in twentieth-century Europe, not only in America. Yet, as late as the 1930s only a few exceptional women, like Kadya Molodowsky in Warsaw and Devorah Fogel in Lemberg (Lvov), had attained any literary reputation of consequence.⁴

In America, on the other hand, a much larger number of Jewish women achieved an artistic and intellectual existence, albeit a circumscribed one. The emergence of women as writers was part of the blending of old and new social and intellectual forces at work in American Jewish life that provided a favorable climate for the acceptance of a female intelligentsia. Some of the Jewish women, especially socialist, Zionist-socialist, and anarchist immigrants, had already participated in cultural activities in Eastern Europe in the 1890s. In addition, immigrant society in America was in need of interpreters of its new experiences, and intellectuals and critics, with little formal education but with insight into the contemporary scene, were perceived as authentic spokesmen. There was an enormous growth of Yiddish publications, and talented and persevering women without academic credentials, like men in similar circumstances, were encouraged to express their views in print. Moreover, during the Progressive Era, American ideas of female emancipation reinforced favorable existing radical Jewish attitudes toward female intellectuality and competence. But most important of all, theoretical ideas of equality were concretized by the behavior of Jewish women, particularly working women, who belied all contemporary stereotypes of immigrant women as passive victims of industrial American society. In the period between 1909, the year of the famous shirtwaist makers' strike, and the 1920s, when Jewish women workers and trade unionists helped organize the garment industry unions, Jewish immigrant women were militant and tenacious. Therefore, those women who spoke on their behalf directly or indirectly received a hearing.

Under what circumstances did East European Jewish women become Yiddish writers? Scanty information exists in Yiddish biographical lexicons, rare autobiographies, and several oral history interviews.⁵ From these sources, it appears that most of the Yiddish women writers, born into Orthodox Jewish households in small towns in Eastern Europe in the late 1800s, began to write before they left Europe for America. Their fathers often worked at a trade or were poor merchants and devoted part of their time to talmudic scholarship. Tending house, their barely literate mothers uttered prayers, the tkhines, written especially for women and used by women in the privacy of their homes to ask God for personal, family, and community happiness.⁶ Orthodox Judaism as practiced in Eastern Europe severely circumscribed the role of women in public worship and in communal affairs, although women were permitted and even encouraged to practice a trade outside the home. Many women, in fact, supported the household while their husbands devoted their lives to religious study.⁷

The women born in the last decades of the nineteenth century were the first generation of East European Jewish women to receive a formal secular education.⁸ Several of the writers began their literary careers as children, encouraged by teachers in the Yiddish folkshules or the state Russian schools of the Pale of Settlement, or by Hebrew tutors. For example, Zelda Knizshnik, one of the earliest Yiddish women poets, who was born in 1869 near Vilna, wrote her first poem in Hebrew at the age of nine. Her first Yiddish poem was published in 1900 in a Cracow literary journal, Der yid. Married at a young age, Knizshnik was unable to pursue a literary career because of poverty and domestic responsibilities, but she began to write again in her later years. Her poems were personal laments upon her sad and lonely fate:

My husband is in America
A son is in Baku;
Another son is in Africa,
A daughter—God, I wish I knew!
Sent away, my little bird,
Exiled from her tree,
And I too wander, drift and dream
Where, where is my home?
A mother's heart is everywhere,
The soul fragments and tears—
I have, oh, so many homes
But rest I do not have.(9)

Even though girls were sent to school, parents quite often disapproved if the young writers took their literary interests too seriously. At times parents regarded writing itself to be an irreligious act. For instance, Malke Lee, one of the few Yiddish poets to write an autobiography, recalled with intense bitterness that her father, a pious man, secretly burned her entire portfolio of poetry in the family oven because he believed it was against God's will for a girl to write.¹⁰

A considerable number of the women writers became radicals in Eastern Europe, and their writing was part of a more extensive political consciousness that often began with the rejection of traditional Orthodox Jewish values. Many of these writers, while still quite young, were repelled by standards set for female behavior. Lilly Bes recalled in an angry poem:

Within me has burst my grandmother's sense of
                    modesty
Revolt burns in me like effervescent wine.
Let good folk curse and hate me,
I can no longer be otherwise.(11)

In their adolescent years in Europe, several writers either joined illegal radical Jewish political organizations or had a relative who belonged. These political groups were particularly important for those young women, mainly manual workers, who did not receive a secondary education, the group providing the place of the school. Furthermore, at the turn of the century, European Jewish radicals lauded women as fellow workers and fellow intellectuals, in contrast to the manner in which they were regarded by the Orthodox male leadership. The hymn of the Bund, the socialist Jewish workers organization, the Shvue (Oath), which was intoned at every mass meeting and at strikes and demonstrations, called upon “Brider un shvester fun arbet un noyt” (Brothers and sisters, united in work and in need). Within the Bund, there were special worker education groups where women without much education were given positions of importance. Women were appointed to the Bund's executive committees; they acted as union organizers, prepared propaganda leaflets, and disseminated revolutionary literature.¹²

At the turn of the century, the women in the Bund did not attempt to organize separate socialist women's groups. Feminism, as an ideology, was considered to be bourgeois, serving the ambitions of middle-class women. As workers, these women identified primarily with the Jewish proletariat, although they were aware of the special problems of women workers, such as unequal pay, work-related health problems, and double work at home and in the factory. It was not until the 1920s, when the Bund became a legal party in Poland, that women's organizations were founded.¹³

Nevertheless, Jewish women in radical groups felt they had broken tradition and were acting outside the female roles assigned them in Jewish society. Their poems expressed these feelings. For instance, Kadya Molodowsky, poet, essayist, and editor of literary-political journals in the United States from the late 1930s until the early 1970s, described her estrangement from traditional Jewish life in her famous poem “Froyen lider,” written in Poland around 1919. Ambivalently, she expressed her sense of alienation, which combined with feelings of strong ties to the women in her family. Adrienne Rich, the American poet and Molodowsky's translator, noted that the poem voiced the difficulty of escaping old models of womanhood and the need to find new concepts of self:

The faces of women long dead, of our family,
come back in the night, come in dreams to me saying,
We have kept our blood pure through long generations,
we brought it to you like a sacred wine
from the kosher cellars of our hearts.
And one of them whispers:
I remained deserted, when my two rosy apples
still hung on the tree
And I gritted away the long nights of waking between
                    my white teeth.
I will go meet the grandmothers, saying:
Your sighs were the whips that lashed me
and drove my young life to the threshold
to escape from your kosher beds.
But wherever the street grows dark you pursue me—
                    wherever a shadow falls.
Your whimperings race like the autumn wind past me,
and your words are the silken cord
still binding my thoughts.
My life is a page ripped out of a holy book
and part of the first line is missing.(14)

East European radicalism made a powerful impact upon those young Yiddish women writers who participated in these movements that gave their lives direction. In extreme instances, women who were trained in the underground Bund engaged in illegal revolutionary activities and were forced to emigrate to the United States in order to escape police arrest. Among them were Esther Luria, Shifre Weiss, Eda Glasser, and Rachel Holtman.

Esther Luria is particularly fascinating, since she reflects a type of Jewish woman revolutionary transplanted from Eastern Europe to the United States. Little is known about her life or her disappearance and possible death. Born in Warsaw in 1877, she was one of very few Jewish women not only to complete a gymnasium education but also to graduate from the University of Bern, Switzerland, with a doctorate in humanistic studies in 1903. In Bern she joined the socialist movement but returned to Russia to help fellow Jews as a member of the Bund. Involved in revolutionary activities in Warsaw, she was arrested several times and, in 1906, was sent to Siberia, from where she escaped in 1912 and fled to New York City.¹⁵

Luria discovered that the socialist movement in America was very different from Europe's. Socialists in America, who were permitted to establish legal parties, and to meet and publish freely, were part of the general reform movement of the Progressive Era and often encouraged alliances with and support of middle-class reformers. This was especially true for women's issues. Unlike Eastern Europe, where no one could vote and socialists isolated their party from liberals and feminists, American socialists supported liberal and some feminist causes. At the height of the American suffrage movement, between 1914 and 1920, Jewish socialists, especially in New York, made a special point of supporting women's suffrage, and the socialist Yiddish press frequently published articles on working women and the vote.¹⁶

Esther Luria tried to earn a living by writing for the Yiddish socialist press in New York: the Jewish Daily Forward, Tsukunft, and Glaykhhayt, the Yiddish edition of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) paper Justice. Her articles about Jewish salon women in Germany, the poet Emma Lazarus, and the sociologist Martha Wolfenstein were meant to impress her working-class readership with the fact that women, even Jewish women, had made important contributions to society outside the home.¹⁷ After 1920 and the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, Luria's articles appeared with less frequency. She then tried to support herself by lecturing on general socialist topics, but there was no interest in her views that did not pertain to women's issues. Unmarried and without family, she lived in terrible poverty and died alone in the Bronx, New York. Even the Leksikon records her death as “192?.”

THE EARLIEST WRITERS: BEFORE THE 1920S

At the turn of the century and well into the second and even third decades of the twentieth century, Yiddish women writers were considered by literary critics to be rare phenomena or, as Kadya Molodowsky noted sarcastically, “gentle, often exotic flowers of the literary garden.”¹⁸ Editors of Yiddish newspapers and journals, especially the anarchist and socialist press, were eager to publish the work of women poets and short story writers, as both a symbol of modernity and a way of increasing circulation. Editors and literary critics who were concerned with the quality of the emerging American Yiddish literature and felt that women might make a special contribution to this genre also encouraged female writers, among them, the literary editor and socialist Abraham Reisen, the anarchist editor of the Fraye arbeter shtime, Sh. Yanovsky, and the poet and literary critic A. Glanz.

The place of women in Yiddish literature, however, was rarely discussed. An article by A. Glanz which appeared in Fraye arbeter shtime on October 30, 1915, entitled “Kultur un di froy” (“Culture and the Woman”), was an exception. Glanz lamented the fact that culture had become stagnant because it was a lopsided product of male creativity; Yiddish culture had therefore become impotent. “Women are not in our culture, neither her individuality nor her personality.” Women had a “new power, a new element” that, if introduced into literature, would also liberate the male and revitalize male originality. Men suffered from egoism and from blind selfish individualism; they thought only of themselves. Women were the opposite of men: “By nature women are not egoistical. By nature women are bound organically to other lives. Out of her body new life comes. Another kind of knowing exists for her. She has a second dimension and understands nature. She is a mother in the deepest sense of the word. Men are ephemeral, women are concrete.” Therefore, “If these female characteristics are introduced into our literature, a true revolution would result.”¹⁹

The revolution Glanz envisioned was, however, slow to arrive. In fact, most of the literary careers of young women writers, although received with some initial enthusiasm, really never matured. This was especially true for the writers of the period before the 1920s but was true to some extent later as well. The lives of two poets, Anna Rappaport and Fradl Shtok, and one short story writer, Yente Serdatzky, are typical of women writers of this early period.

Anna Rappaport has been called “the first woman social poet” by literary historian Nahum Minkoff. Born in 1876, Rappaport emigrated to the United States from Kovna as a girl. Her father had been a famous rabbi in Kovna and her brother was studying for a medical degree at Columbia University. Anna went to work in a sweatshop and, after experiencing a personal sense of outrage because of conditions there, she became a socialist. In 1893, a year of depression and unemployment when male poets like Morris Rosenfeld and David Edelstadt were already well known for their social protest poetry expressing their responses to immigrant American life, Rappaport made her literary debut in the Yiddish socialist newspaper Di arbeter tsaytung. Her first poem, “A bild fun hungers noyt in 1893” (“A Picture of the Hardship of Hunger in 1893”), was of this social protest genre, describing the unemployment problems of Jewish women in New York City. Other poems followed, portraying the conditions of women in the factories and preaching a new world order through socialism. All her poems describe the painful plight of immigrant Jewish women, especially their attempts to control their own lives in the world of terrifying social realities. One of her most interesting poems, “Eyn lebnsbild” (“Picture of Life”) relates how mother love becomes corrupted with opportunism in an industrial society and leads to the destruction of a daughter. The mother convinces her daughter to marry a man the girl does not admire. “You will be free of the machine and you will grow to love him,” advises the mother. But the marriage ends in failure. The daughter explains her difficulties in the last stanza. The Yiddish style is intentionally simple, childlike and almost captures the mood of a folksong: “It is not enough I have no rest / from child and house / He counts out the pennies / and counts out trouble too.”²⁰ Rappaport ceased to write in Yiddish after 1919. For a time she wrote a comic column for the socialist English-language New York Call, but after that she disappeared from the literary horizon.

Fradl Shtok did not write in the then popular genre of didactic social realism. Although her poetry appeared in the anarchist Fraye arbeter shtime, she wrote sonnets and lyric poems that explored the institution of marriage and the relationships between men and women. Erotic, exotic, turbulent, and audacious, her poetry challenged the passivity of women in love relationships. Courtship was central to her poems but women playfully dominated the interactions: “A young man like you, and shy / Come here. I'll coddle you like a child. / Why are you shy? Such a young man afraid of sin? / Come on, you can hide your face in my hair.”²¹

Beautiful, young, and witty, Shtok became a popular figure in the literary cafes of the Lower East Side frequented by the Jewish intelligentsia. Both women and men admired her poetry and her romantic appearance.²² In 1916 she began to publish short stories in the Jewish Daily Forward and in the new daily Der tog. In fact, the great demand for short stories in the growing Yiddish press provided opportunities for several other Yiddish women writers, such as Rachel Luria, Sarah Smith, and Miriam Karpilove, whose stories about women in the shtetl and in contemporary modern America began to appear regularly after 1915-16.²³ But Shtok was most admired, and a collection of her short stories, Ertseylungen, was published in 1919.²⁴ Many of the stories were subtle psychological studies of ordinary people caught in the anguish of a culture in rapid transition. Unfortunately, the reviews were unsympathetic, her severest critic being Glanz in Der tog on December 7, 1919. Glanz expressed the deepest disappointment in his unfulfilled expectations of women writers, and even intimated that Shtok was really a minor poet. An apocryphal story circulated in the literary cafes that upon reading the Glanz review. Shtok went to the editorial offices of Der tog and slapped her critic. But it is a fact that after her poor reception, Shtok stopped writing in Yiddish. Her first and only novel in English, For Musicians Only, appeared in 1917. Its plot involved the obsessional love of a young married Jewish woman for an Italian vaudeville orchestra leader. It was poorly written and not well received by American literary critics. Sometime in the late 1920s Shtok was institutionalized for mental illness.²⁵

The fate of Yente Serdatzky, also a writer of short stories whose earliest work was published before the 1920s, was considerably different in that she remained a Yiddish writer despite adverse criticism and long periods of unproductiveness. In 1969, Sh. Tennenbaum, an essayist and short story writer, wrote a laudatory essay about Serdatzky called “Queen of Union Square.” He portrayed her as cantankerous, articulate, intelligent, and still politically radical as she reigned in the proletarian public park of New York's Union Square in the 1960s.²⁶

Born in the shtetl of Alexat, near Kavnas, Poland (Russia) in 1879, Serdatzky was the daughter of a furniture dealer and talmudic scholar who provided his daughter with an education that included a knowledge of Yiddish, German, Russian, and Hebrew. Their home was a central meeting place for young Yiddish poets, and Abraham Reisen was a frequent visitor. Serdatzky married, gave birth to two children, and was the proprietress of a small grocery store in Alexat until the revolution of 1905 stirred her literary imagination and prompted her to move to Warsaw. Her first short story, “Mirl,” was published in Warsaw in 1905 in the journal Veg, which was then edited by the famous writer Y. L. Peretz. In 1907 she emigrated to New York, where she became a well-known writer, especially for the Fraye arbeter shtime. Her stories portrayed the fate of revolutionary Jewish women in the American environment. Isolated, left without ideals, often having sacrificed family life for the revolution, these women experienced mental depression, poverty, and lonely deaths. The stories written in the 1908-20 period reflect the author's unwillingness to adjust to American life. Her central theme remained one of relentless estrangement. Critics abounded; she was excoriated for the thinness of her plots, the sameness of her characters, and, as in the case of Fradl Shtok, male critics expressed their disappointment in the long-awaited Yiddish women writers. In the 1920s she stopped writing and returned to shopkeeping, only to reappear as an author in the 1940s.²⁷

THE 1920S AND 1930S

Although mass East European immigration to America ceased in the mid-1920s with the official termination of an open U.S. immigration policy, Jewish immigrants did not all become “Americanized” at that time. Nor was Jewish social mobility into the middle class a uniform phenomenon, as secular working class Jews defended their right to a Jewish existence in America within a radical Yiddish culture. The twenties also witnessed the emergence of large numbers of women writers whose work appeared with greater regularity in the Yiddish press and in anthologies and whose individual writings were no longer regarded as extraordinary events. These women writers fell into two major categories: Yiddishist writers, many experimenting with avant-garde techniques, who were not formal members of a particular political party (for example, Anna Margolin and Celia Dropkin, who wrote “pure” literature although they were published in anarchist and socialist papers as well as in such journals of modernism as Insikh); and a group of mainly communist writers whose literary work was motivated by the propaganda needs of the party and by the new ideals of writing a Yiddish proletarian literature.

At this time a Yiddish writer considered herself to be a “radical” intellectual; that is, a person who combined the quest for social justice with a search for personal authenticity, whether she actually belonged to a specific political group or not. She wrote for an audience of other intellectuals, primarily from the Jewish working class, although there were loyal Yiddishists whose economic circumstances would certainly have excluded them from this category. Occasionally, women writers, like some male writers, prided themselves on being “worker-poets,” remaining in the factory and participating in trade union activities, but this was rare. Only a few actually did manual labor for a living. Writing was one way of escaping the factory without abandoning the ideals of working-class solidarity.²⁸

However, the increase in women writers during the 1920s is not an accurate indication of the extent of their integration into radical politics and society. Despite their intense dedication, most women encountered difficulties in being accepted as equals by the Jewish male intelligentsia. Yiddish-speaking radicals treated women with ambivalence. While women's work appeared in socialist, communist, and anarchist papers, not one woman was permanently employed on a radical paper as part of its editorial staff. And when articles were accepted, they were almost never about general political or economic matters, but about “women's issues.” If men found it difficult to earn a living by writing, women found it impossible.

Generally, women writers married and had children. The common pattern was to write before marriage and after widowhood. Intellectual isolation was something very real for them. There was little camaraderie among women writers, in sharp contrast to the long-term friendships and the intimate groups created by male writers. Women were only marginally tolerated in these circles. One had to be a wife, a sister, or a lover to gain admission into the inner sanctum of literary society where one could then share common intellectual and political interests. Many women writers did of course marry men who were active in Jewish Left political and literary circles, but the husbands were usually more famous than their wives, and in some instances wives depended upon their husbands' positions for their own publication. For example, Rachel Holtman married and later divorced Moishe Holtman, an editor of the communist daily Frayhayt. During their marriage she edited the Sunday women's page but apparently lost the position when their marriage was dissolved.²⁹

Immigrant Jewish women intellectuals did not respond to their exclusion from the centers of power or the implicit sexism of their male comrades by demanding access to power or by questioning the relationship between the sexes; nor did they organize a radical feminist movement. There were many reasons for this, rooted in the structure of immigrant American society. The women's isolation from other women and their reliance upon men, as mentioned earlier, was one factor, as was the reality that traditionally, Jewish men had been the intellectuals, and despite the late nineteenth century ideals of equality, echoes of earlier views could still be heard in radical circles. Cultural asymmetry was prevalent, and this meant that male, as opposed to female, activities were always recognized as having greater importance, authority, and value, even when women and men were engaged in the same activities. There were other factors as well. In the 1920s Jewish cultural life was undergoing transformation toward Americanization, and the Yiddishists were beleaguered. Many Yiddish women writers supplemented their incomes by teaching in the Yiddish folkshuln, which the children of socialist and communist parents attended in the afternoon following the public school program. These women focused their energies on keeping the next generation from defecting culturally. Championing Yiddish studies and contending with children might have contributed to their noncontentiousness about their own position as women.

In general, radical Jews did not feel secure in their newfound homeland in the 1920s. Political radicalism itself was under attack from the American government during the Red Scare. The radical movement was split into warring factions, and there was the added fear of anti-Semitism. These problems, faced by women as well as men, exacted a certain measure of solidarity.

Nevertheless, most women believed themselves emancipated and on an approximately equal basis with men in America. In contrast to the positions of their grandmothers and mothers, they were breadwinners, voters, “legal” revolutionaries, and cultural workers. No one seemed to notice that in the 1920s separate women's auxiliaries institutionalized the separate functions of the sexes in both socialist and communist organizations. It became accepted that men did the political work and women did the social and cultural work, although individual men and women transcended the barrier.

Individually, women writers explored their dissatisfaction with this state of affairs. New themes and experimental forms were introduced into Yiddish literature by both male and female writers in the twenties. Some women writers, encouraged to express themselves openly, described their intimate feelings as women and their criticism of traditional Jewish values. Anna Margolin and Celia Dropkin typified the intensely personal and iconoclastic tone of the twenties when they wrote about life's disappointments, ambivalent feelings, their sexual interest, and their hostility to conventional behavior and clichéd emotions.

Margolin's life was unconventional. She had lovers, was twice married, and left an infant son in the permanent care of its father.³⁰ Her sharp wit and intellectual acumen antagonized many of her male contemporaries and made it difficult for her to earn a living as a writer; they rejected her aggressive, self-confident behavior. It is particularly interesting that in her only book of collected poems, Lider (1929), Margolin chose as her first selection a poem entitled “Ikh bin geven amol a yingele” (“I Once Was a Little Boy”) and as her second selection “Muter erd” (“Mother Earth”).³¹ Like other women of her generation who could not accept disdain even when they were unconventional, she eventually grew to pity herself. She wrote her own epitaph, a lament for a wasted life:

She with the cold marble breast
and with the slender illuminating hands,
She dissipated her life
on rubbish, on nothing.
Perhaps she wanted it so, perhaps lusted after
unhappiness, desired seven knives of pain,
And poured life's holy wine
on rubbish, on nothing.
Now she lies broken
the ravaged spirit has abandoned the cage.
Passersby, have pity and be silent.
Say nothing.(32)

Celia Dropkin's life was more conventional. She married, reared five children, and kept house while, as her daughter said, “she worked on pieces of noodle paper, on scratch paper, on total chaos, on figuring out time.”³³ Dropkin accepted the traditional role of women, but in her poetry she expressed the ambivalence of anticipating freedom and fearing its consequences. Her poem “Ikh bin a tsirkus dame” (“I Am a Circus Lady”) illustrates this dichotomy:

I am a circus lady
I dance betwixt
Sharp knives that are fixed,
points up, in the arena.
If I fall I die,
But with my lithe body I
Just touch the sharp edge of your knives.
People hold their breath as my danger they see
and someone is praying to God for me.
The points of your knives seem
To me like a wheel of fire to gleam,
And no one knows how I want to fall.(34)

Dropkin also expressed hostility toward men—a theme rarely expressed in Yiddish literature:

I haven't yet seen you asleep
I'd like to see
how you sleep,
when you've lost your power
over yourself, over me.
I'd like to see you helpless, strung out, dumb.
I'd like to see you
with your eyes shut,
breathless.
I'd like to see you
dead.(35)

Both Margolin and Dropkin wondered in their poetry whether they were not under the influence of some “pagan” power. Anxiously, Margolin wrote in 1920: “With fright, I hear in my mind the heavy steps of forgotten gods.” Dropkin was more enthusiastic in “Dos lid fun a getsendiner” (“Poem of a Pagan”): “Silently, I came to the temple / today before dawn / Ah, how beautiful was my pagan god / Bedecked with flowers.”³⁶

In the 1920s the women who wrote for the communist press rarely dealt with such sensuous themes as did those who published in the anarchist and socialist papers. The communists tended to be puritanical and very much concerned with developing a “correct” working-class literature. But they were often more direct than other radicals in their distaste for female oppression. They openly advocated solidarity among women and pride in womanhood. In their poetry Esther Shumiatcher, Sara Barkan, and Shifre Weiss urged women to combat powerlessness by seeking self-respect and by acting in unison. In the December 1927 issue of Hamer, Shumiatcher called upon women to “Free yourselves from the dark lattices that imprisoned generations.” In the late twenties, she and her famous playwright husband Peretz Hirshbein took an extended trip to China, India, Africa, and the Middle East. In a series of poems, “Baym rand fun khina” (“At the Border of China”), she lamented the plight of women: “Wife and mother / at the border of China / Baskets, filled with your sadness and weariness, hang from your shoulders …”³⁷ Sara Barkan, who had begun working in a factory at the age of nine and whose life was seriously affected by daily toil for herself and her daughter, wrote “Mir, arbeter froyen” (“We, Working Women”), commemorating International Woman's Day in 1925:

We, working women
We are raped in Polish prisons
We are decapitated in China;
And we forge hammers out of our fists,
In every part of the world, in each country
we have cut the rotten cords of yesterday's dark
                    oppression.
Small, delicate, our hands have become hard and
                    muscular.(38)

Although the social status of women in Jewish radical circles did not change in the 1930s, a new, more aggressive tone, criticizing male behavior, emerged in some women's writings. Golde Shibke, in an article entitled “Di arbeter froy un der arbeter ring” (“The Working Woman and Workman's Circle”), blamed her male comrades for limiting the role of women in that socialist “fraternal” organization to a mere women's auxiliary. Since women worked equally hard alongside men in the factories, it was unfair to discriminate against them in a socialist organization.³⁹

Kadya Molodowsky, who emigrated to New York City from Warsaw in 1935, provided a role model for other radical women writers in the late thirties. Considered a serious journalist, poet, and intellectual among the Jewish intelligentsia in Poland, she was unhappy to discover that the New York radical literati considered women authors as “exotic flowers of the literary garden for whom direct and powerful thinking was alien.” She protested the male categorizing of women as a breed apart. “Writing is more an expression of the spirit than of sexual gender,” she insisted in her article “A por verter vegn froyen dikhterin” (“A Few Words about Women Poets”), which appeared in the New York communist literary magazine Signal in 1936. While admitting that there were some differences in male and female literary style, word conception, and personality presentation, she maintained that women writers were the equals of men in their insight, outspokenness, in their political and social awareness, and in their search for a profound understanding of reality. Molodowsky herself wrote some poems about critical political issues of the 1930s. One about the Spanish Civil War, “Tsu di volontirn in shpayne” (“To the Volunteers in Spain”), was published in Hamer in 1938:

At night
when the moon burns above you with death
She awakens me
And calls me to the window
And the sky spreads itself
with stars
and a price tag …
And the debt is so great
And your blood falls on my mind
heavy and red.(40)

It is difficult to assess in what way themes about women or poetry about politics affected the female readers of the radical Yiddish press and literature. Rachel Holtman's autobiography offers a rare glimpse into women's responses. In the mid-1930s Holtman traveled to Los Angeles, a city with a population of over 45,000 Jews, most of whom had arrived in the First World War period, and a wide range of radically oriented organizations and publications.

Holtman found that there were ten women's study circles affiliated with the International Workers Order that held meetings at least weekly and where members studied Yiddish literature. The women read both the Yiddish classics as well as works from contemporary Yiddish writers and discussed current political issues. Holtman described these women, most of whom were dressmakers and militant trade unionists: “The women in these study groups are quite another sort of woman—a mentsh [human being], who consciously educated herself. It is a pleasure to discuss things with her. She is sensitive, talented, understanding, straightforward. She takes a fine fresh look at the world.”⁴¹ Shifre Weiss, a member of one such Los Angeles study circle, shared her work with her group. Her writings included poems about Rosa Luxemburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and one “To My Black Sisters.” She also wrote a poem entitled “Lern krayzn” (“Study Circles”):

We met as a minyan
Eighteen or more;
Building edifices of our culture
Erasing the traces of tears and of pain
Our dreams shall come true
By creating and recreating.
Happiness, Justice and Peace
Shall come to this world.”(42)

Immigrant Yiddish women writers such as Weiss created an extensive literature that expressed their experimental and highly complex perceptions. As Kadya Molodowsky said, they were not exotic flowers of any literary garden. Rather, they were a first generation of immigrant Jews, an emerging female intelligentsia whose self-analysis and critical awareness are well worth exploring further. It is also clear that they experienced, even if they did not always directly confront, the profound contradiction faced by most other radical women in the early twentieth century of living within a pattern of seeming acceptance combined with implicit exclusion.

The literature of these radical Jewish women virtually vanished as its audience disappeared. By the end of the Second World War, Yiddish was hardly read by American Jews, most of whom had become linguistically assimilated. Anarchism, socialism, and communism, the radical movements that once attracted significant numbers of Jewish American workers and intellectuals, were also in deep decline. Yet this literature is an essential component of the American Jewish heritage, not only for its intrinsic value, but also because it and the lives of those who created it provide us with a much broader picture and deeper understanding of the cultural transformation of East European Jewry in America.

Notes

1. Significant biographical information can be found in Leksikon fun der nayer yiddisher literatur (New York, 1956-68). See earlier versions and notes below for additional biographical sources.

2. For greater discussion of Jewish radicals' varying views on Jewish cultural expression, see Arthur Liebman, Jews and the Left (New York, 1979); Melech Epstein, Jewish Labor in the U.S.A., 2 vols. (New York, 1959); and Nora Levin, While Messiah Tarried: Jewish Socialist Movements 1871-1917 (New York, 1977).

3. Celia S. Heller, On the Edge of Destruction: Jews of Poland Between the Two World Wars (New York, 1977), 211-47.

4. Biographical information on Kadya Molodowsky (1896-1975) can be found in her serialized autobiography “Mayn elter zeydes yerushe” (“My Great-Grandfather's Inheritance”), Sviva (March 1965-April 1974), and in the Kadya Molodowsky Papers at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. For Devorah Fogel (1903-43) see Melech Ravitch, Mayn leksikon (Montreal, 1945), 188-90; Ephraim Roytman, “Di amolike Devorah Fogel,” Israel shtime (May 7, 1975); and I. B. Singer, “A Polish Franz Kafka,” New York Times Book Review (July 9, 1978).

5. See Rachel Holtman, Mayn lebnsveg (New York, 1948); Malke Lee, Durkh kindershe oygn (Buenos Aires, 1958); and Molodowsky, “Mayn elter zeydes yerushe.”

6. Interview with Hinde Zaretsky. For tkhines, see chapter 4.

7. Charlotte Baum, “What Made Yetta Work? The Economic Role of Eastern European Jewish Women in the Family,” Response 18 (Summer 1973), 32-38.

8. Heller, Edge of Destruction.

9. Ezra Korman, Yidishe dichterins (Detroit, MI, 1928), 57-58. Unless otherwise noted, the translations are by the author.

10. Lee, Durkh kindershe oygn, 25.

11. Lily Bes, “Fun eygene vegn,” Frayhayt (January 20, 1929).

12. For women in the Bund see Anna Rosenthal, “Di froyen geshtaltn in Bund,” Unzer tsayt 3-4 (November-December 1947), 30-31; and see citations in the original version of this essay.

13. Interview with Dina Blond, one of the leading women in the Bund, December 1978.

14. Kadya Molodowsky, “Froyen lider,” translated by Adrienne Rich, in A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry, ed. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (New York, 1969), 284.

15. Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, 5:30.

16. See Norma Fain Pratt, Morris Hillquit: A Political History of an American Jewish Socialist (Westport, Conn., 1979).

17. These articles appeared in the following issues of Tsukunft: 19:2 (February 1914), 189-95; 20:9 (September 1915), 835-38; 21:9 (September 1916), 792-97; and 22:4 (April 1917), 233-34.

18. Kadya Molodowsky, “A por verter vegn froyen dikhterin,” Signal (July 1936), 36.

19. A. Glanz, “Kultur un di froy,” Fraye arbeter shtime (October 30, 1915).

20. Nahum Minkoff, Pionim fun yidishe poezie in America (New York, 1956) 3:57-80. “Eyn lebnsbild” is quoted on p.68. Reprinted with the permission of Hasye Cooperman Minkoff.

21. Fradl Shtok, “Sonnet,” Di naye heym (New York, 1914), 5.

22. Interview with Rashelle Veprinski.

23. Miriam Karpilove, “Dos leben fun a meydl,” Yidishe arbeter velt (June 30, 1916); Rachel Luria, “Di groyse kraft,” Der tog (June 13, 1919); Sarah Smith, “Der man vil hershn,” Der tog (July 23, 1916).

24. Fradl Shtok, Ertseylungen (New York, 1919).

25. A. Glanz, “Temperment,” Der tog (December 7, 1919); and see citations in earlier versions of this essay.

26. Sh. Tennenbaum, Geshtaltn baym shraybtish (New York, 1969), 47-51.

27. Zalman Reisen, Leksikon fun der yiddisher literatur, prese un filologye (Vilna, 1927-29), 1:684-85; S. Z. Zylbercweig, Leksikon fun yidishn teater (Warsaw, 1934), 1:1524-25.

28. Two poets who regarded themselves as workers were Sara Barkan and Rashelle Veprinski. Ber Green, “Yidishe dikhterin,” Yidishe kultur (December 1973), 33; Leksikon fun der nayer yidishe literatur, 3:491; and interview.

29. Holtman, Mayn lebnsveg, 79-100.

30. Reuben Iceland, Fun unzer friling (Miami Beach, Fla., 1954), 129—72.

31. Anna Margolin, Lider (New York, 1929), 5-6; Adrienne Cooper Gordon, “Myths of the Woman as Artist: A Study of Anna Margolin,” paper presented at the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research Annual Conference, November 11-14, 1979.

32. Iceland, Fun unzer friling, 172 (author's translation).

33. Interview with Esther Unger, Celia Dropkin's daughter, August 1978, in New York City.

34. Celia Dropkin, “Ikh bin a tsirkus dame,” transl. Joseph Leftwich in The Golden Peacock: A Worldwide Treasury of Yiddish Poetry (New York, 1961), 672.

35. Dropkin, “Poem,” translated by Adrienne Rich in Howe and Greenberg, Treasury, 168.

36. Anna Margolin, “Fargesene geter,” Di naye velt (July 23, 1920); Celia Dropkin, “Dos lid fun a getsendiner,” Di naye velt (May 16, 1919).

37. Esther Shumiatcher, “Tsu shvester,” Hamer (December 1927), 17, and “Baym rand fun khina,” Hamer (July 1927), 5; interview with Esther Shumiatcher.

38. Sara Barkan, “Mir, arbeter froyen,” Signal (January 1925), 2; interview with Ber Green.

39. Golde Shibke, “Di arbeter froy un der arbeter ring,” Lodzer Almanak (1934).

40. Kadya Molodowsky, “Tsu di volontirn in shpayne,” Hamer (February 1938), 2.

41. Holtman, Mayn lebnsveg, 152-53.

42. Shifre Weiss, Tsum morgndikn morgn (Los Angeles, 1953), 59.

I acknowledge the kind assistance of Hillel Kempinski of the Jewish Labor Bund Archives and Dina Abramowicz of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The original version of this essay including an appendix of over fifty women who wrote in Yiddish was published in American Jewish History 70 (Fall 1980), 68-90, and reprinted in Decades of Discontent: The Women's Movement, 1920-1940 (Westport, Conn., 1983), ed. Lois Scharf and Joan M. Jensen, 131-52. This abridged and somewhat altered version appears here with the gracious permission of the American Jewish Historical Society.