Weekly Reader: Rokhl Korn
Published on September 08, 2024.
It’s striking how many Yiddish writers didn’t start out writing in Yiddish. In some cases they began in Hebrew, inspired by the Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment movement. In other instances they began in non-Jewish languages, like Russian or Polish. Sometimes they weren’t Yiddish speakers at all and only learned the language as adults in order to write in it. That was the case with the poet Rokhl Korn, who passed away on September 9, 1982. Born on January 15, 1898, on a farm in Galicia, Korn first wrote in Polish before switching to Yiddish after the First World War. She survived the Holocaust in the Soviet Union before making her way to Montreal, Canada, where she lived the rest of her life. In honor of one of the great postwar Yiddish poets, let’s take a look at some of Korn’s work.
—Ezra Glinter, Senior Staff Writer and Editor
A Shelf of Her Own
Korn was a prolific poet, publishing some eight volumes of poetry during her lifetime, as well as two volumes of prose. While a few of those books are now difficult to get ahold of, you can find most of them in our Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library.
In Translation
There are a few volumes of Korn’s work in English translation, and her work has been widely anthologized. If you pick up just about any collection of Yiddish poetry, chances are good that there will be something of her work in there. And you can find a number of translations of Korn’s poetry on our website, including the following three selections, all translated by Miriam Isaacs.
Read Rokhl Korn’s poem “The Owl”
Read Rokhl Korn’s poem “Exodus”
Read Rokh Korn’s poems “Springtime Back Home” and “It Seems It Had to Be”
In Her Own Words
As a member of Montreal’s Yiddish literary community, Korn often spoke at the city’s Jewish Public Library, either by herself or together with other writers and artists. You can find many of her recorded talks in our Frances Brandt Online Yiddish Audio Library.
A Voice for the Ages
While much of Korn’s poetry has been translated (though there’s plenty still to go), that isn’t the case with her lectures. One exception is this talk, marking the publication of her book Farbitene vor (A Changing Reality) in 1977, in which she talks about her youth and creative birth. As translator Mikhl Yashinsky notes, “She sounds like an aged blues singer who ambles up to the microphone not to praise herself for years of accomplishment but to conjure up the uncertain and unknown of life once upon a time.”
In Memoriam
Korn was not just one of the great postwar Yiddish poets but also a notable personality who lives on in the memories of people who knew her. Over the years our Wexler Oral History Project has collected some of those reminiscences, as well as performances and adaptations of some of Korn’s work.
Watch Sara Israel, former Yiddish Book Center fellow, discuss Korn’s work