Irena Klepfisz on Birth and Later Years: New and Collected Poems

Following the release of Birth and Later Years: New and Collected Poems, 1971–2021, poet Irena Klepfisz sat down to speak with The Shmooze about her life, work, and the release of her collected poems. Irena was born in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941. She survived the war hiding in an orphanage and later in the Polish countryside with her mother. After the war they lived in Łódź and Sweden before settling in New York in 1949. She played a key role in the emergent Jewish lesbian movement starting in the 1970s and has been dedicated to the recovery and transmission of women’s writing in Yiddish as an active scholar, translator, and teacher.