We often forget that the Singer literary dynasty includes Esther Kreitman (1891-1954), the older sister of Israel Joshua and Isaac Bashevis. Kreitman was in fact much more than the mere inspiration for Bashevis’ Yentl; she is rather a talented and powerful writer in her own right. Instead of simple nostalgia for the world from which she emerged, Kreitman critically appraises this world’s marginalization of women and struggles to give a voice to the excluded and invisible. In her 1944 novel Brilyantn, she offers a rich portrait of a diamond merchant during World War I. Set in Antwerp and London, where Kreitman herself spent much of her married life, Brilyantn chronicles the fate of a Jewish family in the midst of the various upheavals of the early 20th century. Bashevis wasn’t just speaking from brotherly love when he remarked “I do not know of a single woman in Yiddish literature who wrote better than she did.”