Rachel Korn

When she returned to Poland after the war, she married Hersh Korn and settled in the Galician city of Przemyśl. Rachel Korn was fast on her way to becoming a recognized, important writer in Polish, her first language. In her twenties, her husband encouraged her to write in Yiddish, and she eventually wrote solely in Yiddish. Korn created a sensation with her first volume of poetry, becoming one of the very few women Yiddish writers to be regularly published in the major literary journals of the day.

After the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, the Korn family (Rachel, her husband and their daughter Irene), attempted to flee to the United States but were delayed in eastern Poland as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop division of Poland. In June 1941, Korn went to visit her daughter in Lwów, leaving her husband in Przemyśl. It was the last time she would ever see him; the Germans captured the town within hours. During the bombardment of Lwów, Korn and her daughter escaped into the Soviet Union, where the two remained until the end of the war.

Korn returned to Poland in 1945 at the end of the war, arriving in Łódź and eventually Warsaw. In 1946, she was the first Jewish writer to be invited to join the PEN club in Stockholm, Sweden, after an interview in Stockholm with the Swedish prince, who was also a writer and the secretary of the Writers' Union. During the interview Korn was able to obtain visas for herself and other writers to leave Poland for Sweden. She lived there until 1948 when she moved to Montreal, where she lived out the rest of her life. Rachel Korn died in 1982.

Among the striking features of Korn's poetry is the vibrance of natural imagery that suffuses the work. Her poetry paints a vivid landscape of the terrain of the Old Country and of the New World. The very titles of Korn’s collections, Village, Red Poppies, Earth, point at the centrality of the physical world in her work. Growing up in a rural village, Korn once said, “My friends were the trees…whom I simply saw as people.”

In one of her later poems, “Autumn Etude,” Korn give one of her distinctive insights into what she referred to as the “landscape of the soul.”

On the misted panes
The wind pastes a tree-leaf —
A yellowed sign
That summer’s gone
Like a wilted dream.
    translated by Edward Ginsburg

Today, Rachel Korn is being rediscovered by a new generation of readers, thanks to the efforts of Korn's daughter and grandson, who have created an extraordinary virtual exhibition of Korn's life and work on the internet at www.rachelkorn.com. The site includes an impressive display of photographs of the writer, translations of her work, and recordings of her reading from her poetry.