Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) is a leading poet, feminist, lesbian activist, writer, editor, translator, and a pioneer in the rediscovery of Yiddish women writers. Her most recent collection, Her Birth and Later Years: New and Collected Poems 1971-2021 (2022) was published by Wesleyan University Press. She was born in the Warsaw Ghetto, and survived the war hidden in a Catholic orphanage and then, once her mother came to get her, passing as Aryans in the Polish countryside. Her father was a Bundist who was killed in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. She immigrated to Sweden in 1946 and to the United States in 1949, where she grew up in a closely-knit, Yiddish-speaking Bundist Holocaust survivor community in the Bronx, New York.
Klepfisz received a PhD in English from the University of Chicago and did postdoctoral studies in Yiddish at YIVO's Max Weinreich Center for Advanced Jewish Studies. She also became active within the feminist and lesbian movements. She began to incorporate Yiddish in her English-language poetry, inspired by the bilingual poetry of Gloria Anzaldúa. She taught Jewish women’s writing at Barnard College for several decades, as well as teaching at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, and in Yiddish cultural programs.
Klepfisz’s poem Bashert (a Yiddish word for inevitable, or predestined) deals with the totality of Holocaust loss and the torment of its aftermath. Bashert explores the incomprehensibility of the khurbn – the Yiddish term for the Holocaust – and the role that a combination of chance and will played in one’s death or survival. It reflects on the impact of history on the individual, and the challenges of embracing ancestral heritage. The poem is concerned with the baffling randomness, or seeming predestination, of not only the Holocaust, but the human condition in general.
Bashert first appeared in the lesbian journal Sinister Wisdom (1982) and in Klepfisz’s second volume of poetry, Keeper of Accounts (1982). The poem begins with two introductory sections, dedicated “to those who died,” and “to those who survived.” These dedications have since been a staple feature of Holocaust commemorations, and in particular, commemorations of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April 19, 1943). Bashert has also been incorporated into memorial services for AIDS victims, as well as excerpted in Passover Haggadahs. Today, Bashert remains an iconic commemorative poem about the incomprehensibility of loss and survival, as well as a transformative text for individual and collective wrestling with historical legacies.
Cover image: Irena Klepfisz
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Multimedia Links
- An extensive bio of Irena Klepfisz can be found at the Jewish Women’s Archive. She was listed as one of Forward 50 Influential American Jews in 2019 as the “trailblazing lesbian poet, intellectual and political activist, and the keeper of the Bundist flame.” That same year, she was also named one of the 2019 Sexiest Jewish Intellectuals Alive.
- Excerpts of the Wexler Oral History Project’s interview with Irena Klepfisz shed light on her life and oeuvre: she talks about her father, Michał Klepfisz, and his role in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (3:09 min); the traumatic experience of being a Holocaust survivor and American Holocaust memorials (5:53); her path to Yiddish-English poetry (6:55), and her work on the rediscovery of Yiddish Women Writers and her identity (6:56).
- In 2017, Irena Klepfisz did a reading tour in Poland for the first time, and here she talks about the experience of being celebrated as a poet in the country of her birth (7:22).
- Irena Klepfisz discusses her life journey, poetry, and activism in a recent Yiddish-English interview for Vaybertaytsh: A Feminist Podcast in Yiddish (2019).
- Irena Klepfisz in conversation with Agi Legutko, reflecting on the 1995 "Di Froyen" conference, and the growing prominence of Yiddish women writers, translators, artists, and scholars, from the beginnings of the modern feminist movement until today, at the Yiddish Book Center event, Di Froyen: Celebrating the Women of Yiddish Literature, November 4, 2022.
Bibliography
- To read more of Klepfisz’s poetry, see Her Birth and Later Years: New and Collected Poems 1971-2021 (2022). For her non-fiction prose, see her essay on “Secular Jewish Identity: Yidishkayt in America” in The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women’s Anthology (1989).
- Klepfisz wrote an influential introduction, “Queens of Contradiction: A Feminist Introduction to Yiddish Women Writers” to Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers (1994), and also published an essay collection, Dreams of An Insomniac: Jewish Feminist Essays, Speeches, and Diatribes (1990), which includes essays on the Holocaust, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, class and lesbian Jewish identity. Her most recent essay on Yiddish culture and women writers: “The 2087th Question or When Silence Is the Only Answer” appeared online in In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies (2020).
- For a discussion of “Bashert” and Klepfisz’s poetry, see Adrienne Rich’s introduction to A Few Words in the Mother Tongue: Poems Selected and New (1971-1990) (1990); and an interview with Irena Klepfisz in Meaning and Memory: Interviews with Fourteen Jewish Poets (2001, 233-254).
- For scholarship on Klepfisz, see Laurence Roth, “Pedagogy and the Mother Tongue: Irena Klepfisz’s ‘Di Rayze Aheym/The Journey Home’” in Symposium (1999, 52:4, 269-78), and Zohar Weiman-Kelman, “Legible Lesbian Lines: The Bilingual Poetry of Irena Klepfisz” in Journal of Lesbian Studies (23:1, 2019, 21-35). An early but extensive critical and bibliographical entry on Irena Klepfisz can be found in American Jewish Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical and Critical Sourcebook (1994).