Stories That Celebrate Women Yiddish Poets
How Literary Legacies Are Handed Down Through Generations
April is month four of our yearlong Decade of Discovery theme, Women in Yiddish. This is also National Poetry Month, so we’re taking the opportunity to highlight Yiddish women poets. You’ll hear descendants of women poets describe how literary legacies are passed down through generations and what it was like having a poet in the family; they also recite poems and talk about what it has meant personally to discover the works.
Malka Lee: Poetess and Mother
Yvette (Chave) Marrin, daughter of Yiddish writers Malka Lee and Aaron Rappoport, speaks about what it was like having a poet for a mother.
“I Think, ‘Ah, Is This What She Thought?’”: Discovering Celia Dropkin’s Work in Translation
Elizabeth Starčević, granddaughter of Yiddish poet Celia Dropkin, explains how she was able to read her grandmother’s writing in translation and describes what it was like to encounter her work for the first time.
“Es benkt zikh”: A Yiddish Poem by Edith Kaplan Bregman
Diana Bregman Feld reads aloud and sings a poem that her mother, poet Edith Kaplan Bregman, wrote and that an Israeli composer put to music.
Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman's Art and Writing
Itzik Gottesman—folklorist and associate editor at the Forverts—describes the creativity of his mother, Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman, who was both a visual artist and a writer.
Kadia Molodowsky’s Debate with Her Niece about Religion and Yiddishkayt
Edith Schwarz, niece of Yiddish poet Kadia Molodowsky, outlines her debate with her aunt about religion, Jewishness, and Yiddish culture. She specifically remembers Molodowsky’s commitment to Jewish community, food, and culture but not to organized religion.
Watch her full interview and excerpts.
Buy Paper Bridges: Selected Poems by Kadia Molodosky in our bookstore
My Aunt Alice's Poetry
Lilly Gaev, psychotherapist and child of Holocaust survivors, speaks about her aunt Alice Tarshish’s Yiddish poetry and a time she translated it for a Passover seder with her children.
Watch her full interview and excerpts.