Women Writing in Yiddish

How many female Yiddish poets can you name? What about short story writers? Novelists?  For most readers, the numbers decline rapidly with each question. Although many poets have been translated into English, prose translations are relatively new. Women were said to have written no novels or to have written “domestic” novels in Yiddish. Recent archival research has revealed how wrong that assumption is. Women’s stories and novellas were published in the most important Yiddish periodicals as early as the 1880s. Among the novelists are some well-known poets.  

In this course, we will read and discuss literature written by women (in English translation, with Yiddish texts provided for those who want them). Several of the authors we consider may be familiar to some; others are virtually unknown. There are too many names to list here, but they include writers as diverse as Tsilye Dropkin, Rashel Veprinski, Kadya Molodovsky, Ana Margolin, Fradel Shtok, Lili Berger, Chana Blankshteyn, Rochel Faygenberg, Shira Gorshman, Miriam Karpilove, Miriam Raskin, Chava Rosenfarb, Bas Malke, Salomea Perl, Izabella, and more. The inclusion of women who wrote prose revolutionizes our understanding of Yiddish culture and literary history. In addition to previously published translations, we will read new, as yet unpublished translations of several of these authors.

Required Reading:

A Jewish Refugee in New York: Rivke Zilberg’s Journal
This book will be available for purchase on the first day of class.

Anita Norich is the Tikva Frymer-Kensky Collegiate Professor of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Writing in Tongues: Yiddish Translation in the 20th Century (2013), Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Literature in America During the Holocaust (2007), The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer (1991); and co-editor of Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures: Comparative Perspectives (2016), Jewish Literatures and Cultures: Context and Intertext (2008), and Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures (1992). She translates Yiddish literature, and teaches, lectures, and publishes on a range of topics concerning modern Jewish cultures, Yiddish language and literature, Jewish American literature, and Holocaust literature.

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