The name in the poem: women Yiddish poets (1). (2024)

A poet's name appearing in a poem signals the question: Towhat degree does the individual writer speak for her/himself and to whatdegree for the community? In Old Yiddish poems, no modern idea of theindividual writer is present. When the poet signs her name--RivkeTiktiner in an acrostic, Royzl Fishls and Toybe Pan in a rhymedstanza--she carves her name into her prayer or proem according to theconvention of signature established by medieval Hebrew liturgical poems.She names herself as a woman linked to Jewish learning through maleancestors and as a voice for the Jewish people awaiting messianicredemption. Such a poet signs her name to claim the distinction of anauthorship predicated on the author's place within the Jewishcommunity and its conventions, both literary and religious. But whenmodern women poets--Anna Margolin, Kadya Molodowsky, Rokhl Korn--placetheir names in a Yiddish poem, they inscribe a vexed individuality. Thepull away from traditional Jewish life produces a literary tension between the poet's responsibilities to voice the will of the Jewishpeople and her own desires. The lyric poem becomes an analogue for theindividual person, yet vestiges of communal responsibility andtraditional writings linger in its Yiddish language, culture, andhistorical context.

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In Jewish literary tradition, the presence of the poet's namein a poem begins in the classical period of Hebrew liturgical poems, orpiyyutim, between the mid-sixth and the late eighth centuries CE. In theearliest liturgical poems, poets, following biblical examples, as inPsalm 119, (2) often determined the length and order of their poems byemploying alphabetical or "abecedarian" (3) acrostics, thatis, in its simplest form, starting the first line of a poem with an[LANGUAGE NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]-the first letter of the Hebrewalphabet--and then each subsequent line with the next letter, until all22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet were used, and a reader, looking downthe page, would see the lines of the poem in alphabetical order. (4) Inthe classical period, as the major genres and devices of liturgicalpoems became far more complex, "the acrostics became highlyintricate, sometimes spelling out not only the name of the author, ...but also his father's name, his place of residence, his occupation,and even concluding formulas such as hazak, 'be strong!'"(5) This spelling out of the author's name, his lineage, hislocation, and an epithet weaves the composer into his composition,writing a message to the reader that is independent of the content ofthe poem, challenging the reader to read in two ways at once, and tothink simultaneously of both the poem's official story and theperson whose hand and mind moved in synchrony to shape the poem.

For example, one Amittai Ben Shephatiah, of late-ninth centuryItaly, writes a poem, titled by its translator T. Carmi as"Moses' Journey Through Heaven," in which the poetnarrates how Moses, ascending to Paradise, scared off the mighty angelsguarding Heaven with his humbleness and then "walked around on thefirmament as a man walks in his own neighborhood." (6) While thepoem proceeds to tell how Moses encounters the inhabitants of Heaven,each angel more terrifyingly holy than the previous one, it also tellsanother story, beginning each of the first four stanzas with the letters[LANGUAGE NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]--Amittai--and the first three linesof the fifth and final stanza with [LANGUAGE NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]hazak (be strong!). The spelling out of the poet's first name keepsthe poem anchored to the earth, and the formulaic imperative hazakreminds the reader and the writer both of the strength and fortituderequired to make a poem, and seems to encourage at once the poet, thereader of the densely allusive Hebrew, and even the character Moses tocontinue striving. It seems, then, that by inserting his name into hispoem, the poet links the earthly endeavor of writing a poem with thepoem's divine content.

Long after the golden age of the piyyutim, we find a poem writtenin Yiddish during the first half of the fifteenth century by one RebZelmelin, a Hebrew and Yiddish poet who lived and was active in Erfurth,in what is now Germany. This poem, "Shabes-lid" (SabbathSong), begins by retelling the story of the Hebrews' enslavement inEgypt and their rescue by God from Pharaoh's armies crossing theRed Sea, and ends with a thanksgiving to God for the good loaf ofShabbes khale on the poet's table. (7) Typical of Old Yiddishpoems, "Shabes-lid" places the poet's personal situationwithin the framework of sacred history and his name in the poem. As M.Bassin, the editor, notes in the anthology where Shabes-lid wasreprinted in 1917, "The initial letters of the three stanzas spellout [LANGUAGE NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] 'ZEL,' the beginningof the author's name." (8) Reb Zelmelin, clearly acquaintedwith the convention of acrostics in the Hebrew liturgical poem,translated this pattern of inscription to his Yiddish version of one ofhis Hebrew poems. With the Yiddish acrostic of his name, Reb Zelmelinlays claim to the poem. (9)

The device of the author's name acrostic crosses the dividesbetween languages and genders. A contemporary of Reb Zelmelin, althoughhalfway across the Jewish world, was a woman who is known to us onlybecause she inserted her name into an acrostic in her Hebrew poembeginning with the line, "Blessed, majestic, and terrible,"which survives in a manuscript describing the author as "a woman ofvirtue, the lady Merecina, the Rabbiness from Gerona." (10) ThisMerecina writes in a style that alludes in almost every line to versesfrom the Bible--Psalms, Proverbs, Deuteronomy, Numbers, and Jeremiah.She asks God to intervene in a dispute on her behalf and frames herpersonal complaint within a prayer that God should remedy the plight ofall the people of Israel. And, in the way of the liturgical poets,Merecina inscribes her Hebrew name [LANGUAGE NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]into the poem in an acrostic, spelling it out in the first letter of thefirst line of each of the five stanzas. Writing her authorial signatur einto the poem's very structure, this poet writes herself into theHebrew liturgical tradition. Without this acrostic, we would have noidea that a woman in the fifteenth century had ever written in this formand no record that Merecina had ever existed. The acrostic, then, notonly links a poem with its author, but also provides evidence of thevery existence of that woman.

In the late sixteenth century, some 130 years after Merecina wrotein northern Spain, two women inscribed their names in Yiddish poems. Thefirst, like Merecina, utilized the conventional signature of the authorsof the piyyutim. Rikve Tiktiner, from a town in northeastern Poland,wrote "Simkhes toyre lid" (Simkhes Torah Poem), a poempraising God, retelling stories of the Jews receiving the Torah, andpraying for the Messiah to come. The poem was likely sung by womendecorating the Torah scrolls for Simkhes Torah, the holiday celebratingthe conclusion and renewed beginning of the weekly synagogue reading ofthe Torah. (11) In the first half of the poem, the initial lines of eachrhymed couplet form an abecedarian acrostic, which is followed, in thesecond half of the poem, by an acrostic that spells out theauthor's name, "Rivke, has Moreynu haRov Reb Mayer,"Rivke, daughter of Our Teacher the Rabbi Reb (Mr.) Mayer. Rivke Tiktinerwas also known as the author of Meneykes Rivke--Rivke'sNursemaid--a book on ethical behavior for women, written after 1581 andfirst published in Prague in 1609 and Krakow in 1618. (12)

Instead of carving her name like a coded message into the skeletalstructure of the poem with an acrostic, the second Yiddish poet followedanother convention of claiming authorship, which was characteristic ofboth the Yiddish chivalric romance of Elijah Bakhur's Bove-bukh andthe Yiddish supplicatory prayers written for and sometimes by women, forindividual recitation, the tkhines. (13) She worked her full name andlineage into the concluding lines of the poem. (14) In 1586, RoyzlFishls, the daughter of Yoysef Halevi of Krakow, introduced a volume ofthe Psalms, translated into Yiddish verse by one Moyshe Shtendl, withher own rhymed poem that explains why she has published this book:

mit hoylf gots yas' hob ikh mir in zin ginumn.un mit der hoylf fun got yas hof ikh do durkh tsu kumn:dos getlikh's 'tehilim af toytsh in der tsayt lozin vayzn.in er vertung dos ider men zol got yas libn un frayzn:es zayn froy oder man.vi dovid hamelekh olev hasholem hot giton: (15) (lines 1-6)(With God's help, blessed be He, this I have undertakenAnd with the help of God, blessed be He, I hope not to be mistaken:At this time to present in Yiddish these godly psalms.In the expectation that with them God shall be loved and sung:That is to say, by either woman or man.As King David (peace unto him) has done:)

The poem opens with a couplet acknowledging God's help as thepoet undertakes the twofold project of writing her poem and ofpublishing Moyshe Shtendal's Yiddish translation of the Psalms. Shetells us that she is publishing the Psalms in Yiddish in order to enableboth men and women to sing their praise of God. In line 6, Royzlcompares this act of devotion--praising God by reciting the Psalms--tothe act of the legendary author of the Psalms themselves, King David.With this simile, Royzl Fishls brings into the same realm of existenceDavid, the biblical poet-king, and her contemporary Yiddish reader. Byadding, after the name of King David, the abbreviation for the formulaicHebrew phrase honoring the dead, "olev hasholem" (peace ontohim), and by stating that the contemporary female or male readers ofYiddish will sing the Psalms just as the Psalms' ancient author,King David, once did, Royzl reflects the traditional notion of Jewishhistory's unbroken continuum from the Hebrew Bible until thepresent day .

As Royzl's poem continues, she discusses the provenance of theparticular translation of Psalms she is publishing and then advertisesits charms:

dos harov moyshe Shtendil hot af toytsh gemakht.in dem raym un nigen fun SHMUEL BUKH gibrakht:in er vartung es zol zayn liblikh tsu leynen.manen un froyen un di frume meydlekh.den es virt zayn zer bashaydlekh: (lines 13-17)(Roy Moyshe Shtendal translated this into Yiddish.Carried it into the rhyme and melody of the Shmuel-bukh; (16)In the expectation that it shall be lovely to read.For men and women and the pious girls.That it will be meaningful to them:)

The poet presents the name of the translator of the Hebrew psalmsinto Yiddish verse, Roy (Rabbi) Moyshe Shtendal. As a publisherpromoting her product, Royzl emphasizes the currency of Shtendal'stranslation, which he has set "in dem raym un nigen fun SHMUELBUKH," into the rhyme and melody of the Shmuel bukh, a popular epicpoem based on the biblical and midrashic tales about the heroic KingDavid. Shtendal has taken into account the audience of the moment bytranslating King David's ancient Hebrew Psalms into the poetic formof the contemporary Yiddish retelling of the King David story. In fact,though, modern scholars have determined that Shtendal's Psalmtranslations are not set in the stanzaic form of the Shmuel bukh!

Royzl's phrase "manen un froyen un di frumemeydlekh" ([for] men, women, and the pious girls) is a variant ofthe apologetics that often appeared at that time in prefaces and ontitle pages of Yiddish devotional literature to designate the intendedaudience ("Far froyen, meydlekh, un mener vos zaynen vifroyen," [For women, girls, and men who are like women, i.e.,uneducated men unable to read Hebrew]). (17) When, in these lines, RoyzlFishls alludes to two examples of popular Yiddish literature, the Shmuelbukh and the tkhines--an entertainment narrative and women'sprayers--she demonstrates that as a publisher well versed in the Yiddishwritings of her day, she intends this book of Psalms to sell.

The poet then describes her own role in the production of the book:

do hob ikhs mit mayner hand iber shrib.dos es iz nisht drinen giblibn:un hob mikh bidakht.un in den druk gibrakht: (lines 18-21)(Here in my own hand I have copied over.The entire work and nothing was left over:And with care considered it.And brought it into print:)

Like a merchant committed to truth in advertising, Royzl Fishlswants to ensure that her readers know exactly what she has done to bringShtendal's translation to them. She has "copied over"(iber shribn) the text with her own hand, making sure not to omitanything (dos es iz nisht drinen geblibn). Having considered or lookedover the text with careful attention, (un hob mikh bidakht), she hasbrought it into print (un in den druk gibrakht). These lines attest tothe quality of Royzl Fishls' work as a copyist, editor, andprinter.

In the final three couplets, the poet presents her signature, thatis, her name and her lineage:

royzl bar fishl ton mikh di loyt nenendos makht dos zi [zey] mayn fater zal' nit kenin:harov reb yoysef levi iz zayn nomen fun der levim gishlekht.di zayn ale gots yas' knekht:un zayn fater MVH"R [moreynu ha rov] yehudah levi olev hasholem der altn.der hot finftsing yor isu kehiles hakoydesh ludmir yeshive gehalth: (lines 22-27)(Royzl daughter of Reb Fishl is what the people call me.They do this [because] they do not know him, my father (of blessed memory):The Rov Reb Yoysef Levi is his name, of the Levite line. (18)These are all the servants of blessed God, to the last one:And Our Teacher the Rov Yehudah Levi (peace unto him), his aged father,He dedicated fifty years to the yeshiva in the Holy Community of Ludmir.)

Here, Royzi gives her name as "Royzl bar Fishi," anotherversion of "Royzl Fishls." (19) However, the poem suggeststhat Royzi Fishls is not the poet's real name, for her townspeopledo not know her deceased father, "Harov reb yoyseflevi" (RabbiMr. Josef Levi). (20) Perhaps Roy Reb Yoysef Levi was the Hebrew ratherthan Yiddish name of Royzi Fishis' father, or perhaps Royzl, whoconfesses in the poem that she "was forced to wander," isliving far from her birthplace and those who knew her family. Whateverthe reason, she asserts with some urgency her true identity as thedescendent of rabbis, learned men, teachers. The final couplet furtheremphasizes the poet's yikhes, her inherited scholarly honor: Royzlnames her father's father, Yehudah Levi, who bore the honorifictitle Moreynu haRov (Our Teacher the Rabbi) and was long a scholar ofsacred texts in the yeshiva of Ludmir (Ludomir), a Jewish community inthe Ukraine dating from the twelfth century, which in the mid-sixteenthcentury, was famous for its ra bbis. (21)

This poem, then, is filled with names: the poet's name, thoseof her father and her grandfather--both of whom were teachers andrabbis; the name of the translator of the Psalms and the name of thelegendary author of the Psalms; the names of the Jewish communities ofHanover and Ludmir, and, of course, the name of God. Teachers, rabbis,translators, and now the author of this poem mediate between the sacredtext and its readers. By writing her name into her poem's catalogueof learned men's names, Royzl Fishls, a woman, joins the traditionof textual interpreters. Although Royzl Fishls does not mention her ownmother or grandmothers in her list, and thus does not invoke a directlineage of women, she implicitly includes women as she contemplates thefuture of her book. Into the community of scholars, writers, andprinters, she invites other women and girls, as well as men, as readers,to find their own meanings in the Hebrew Psalms, which she brings themin the Yiddish vernacular. Rather than encode her name into the verticalstructure of the poem with an acrostic, following the example of theauthors of medieval Hebrew piyyutim, Royzl Fishls follows theconventions of two Yiddish genres--the popular epic and the devotionaltkhine--by signing her name and ancestry into the concluding lines ofthe poem.

Although Royzl Fishls' sixteenth century poem "Mithoylfgots yas a" introduces the Psalms translated into Yiddish forwomen, and in the process preserves the identity of Royzl Fishis herselfas a reader, writer, and publisher, the poem itself is not devotional.In contrast, and in concert with the farflung fifteenth-century Hebrewpiyyut by the Spanish Rabbiness Merecina and Yiddish prayer by theGerman Reb Zelmelin, Toybe Pan's poem speaks directly to God.

Toybe Pan most likely lived and wrote in Prague during theseventeenth century. (22) Her poem consists of fifty quatrains, eachending with a fifth line refrain, Foter kinig, (Father King). The titleof the poem is a rhymed couplet that announces the poem'soriginality and its language: "Eyn sheyn lid naye gimakht/beloshntkhine iz vardin oys gitrakht" (A Brand-New Beautiful Song/Composed in the Tkhine-Tongue). (23) The first half of the title,"Eyn sheyn lid naye gmakht," literally, "A beautiful poemnewly made," advertises the poem according to the conventions ofthe day, as aesthetically pleasing and as original. The second half ofthe title, "beloshn tkhine iz vardin oys gitrakht," literally,"was invented in the language of the tkhine," designates boththe language of composition, Yiddish rather than Hebrew, and the genreof the tkhines. Beneath the title stands a third line, "B'nign adir ayom vnora" (to the tune of "Mighty, Terrible,and Awful"). A variant edition of this poem gives a differentepigra ph, "B'nign akeyde," (to the tune of "TheBinding of Isaac"). (24)

The title and epigraph indicate that Toybe Pan, composing this poemwithin two liturgical stances, made something new. While the title linksToybe Pan's poem to the women's realm of individual prayers inYiddish, the epigraph, indicating the melody to which the poem should besung, suggests a communal recitation of the poem; communal prayer inturn suggests the domain of males, because the traditional Jewish prayercommunity is defined as a minyan, a quorum often men, and the melodiescited are Hebrew prayers chanted in the synagogue on the Day ofAtonement. Moreover, the poem's refrain, which in itself suggestscommunal performance or public recitation, is a Yiddish translation(Foter kinig, Father King) of a familiar Hebrew prayer, "A vinumalkeinu," (Our Father, our King), also chanted in the Yom Kippurliturgy, among other times. (25) This combination of loshn koydesh (HolyTongue, Hebrew/Aramaic) referents and Yiddish forms suggests that ToybePan deliberately composed a poem that unites Yiddish prayers recitedprivately by women with Hebrew prayers chanted publicly by men. ToybePan expands the public, the community, to include women as well as men.In this way, Toybe Pan, like Royzl Fishls, at the outset, places herselfas a female writer into a literary form that combines male and femaletraditions.

In the 50 stanzas of this poem, Toybe Pan addresses God, beggingHim to be merciful and to stop the terrible plague afflictingPrague's Jews. Employing the familiar form "you" (du) toaddress God, typically used in the tkhines, she speaks in the voice ofthe collective, "we" (mir), not the individual "I"(ikh). Rather than request the generalized messianic redemption of theJews, which will take place at some unspecified point in the future, aconvention in many tkhines, Toybe Pan presents a hope for a delimitedand concrete salvation, one bound to the worldly present as experiencedby the speaker and her community. In this sense, Toybe Pan's poemis a public prayer, to be sung in the synagogue's communal worship,although it is written in the language of daily life and privatewomen's prayers.

The poem reveals, in increasing detail, specific events andpractices in Toybe Pan's community during the plague. In Stanza 7,the poet tells how a person, infected by the plague, is isolated in asick house until he or she, inevitably, expires. In subsequent stanzas(8-11), she describes the help given to the plague victims by khameyshananshim, the Five Men, perhaps a benevolent group, who put themselvesat risk to make sure that no one has been forgotten, by frume vayber,pious women, and by other communal organizations that perform many gooddeeds for the stricken.

Like other devotional writings, though, Toybe Pan's poeminvokes sacred history in order to persuade God to help those in thepresent moment. She cites the example of Abraham bargaining with God tosave Sodom if ten righteous men could be found (Genesis 18:22-32). Fromthis comparison, it follows that if Abraham could convince God to saveSodom for the sake of ten innocents, then why shouldn't Toybe Panconvince God to save the Jews of Prague for the sake of their numerouspious and righteous members?

In this long and complex poem, Toybe Pan addresses contemporarypolitics. Well aware that the Jews of Prague might be falsely blamed andpunished for having caused the plague, Toybe Pan prays that "theEmperor should not believe all the evil spoken about us" (Stanza23) and that "he shall be merciful to the unfortunatecommunity" (Stanza 24). When she tells of Queen Esther'slegendary heroism in persuading King Ahashuerus to save the Jews ofShushan from Haman (Stanzas 31-32), Toybe Pan implies an analogy betweenthe Jewish queen's speech and her own efforts in her poem to savethe Jews of Prague.

Explaining that she has taken on the role of communal spokespersonbecause the cantor and rabbi have both died (Stanza 34), Toybe addressesthe dead rabbi directly, describing the painful death by blisters ofinnocent children, both toddlers and "those who have alreadylearned to read and pray." Unlike a modern poet, who might striveto express her sorrow in original words, Toybe Pan recasts phrases fromKing David's psalms in order to give her individual emotions moreweight. The words expressing the grief of a legendary figure such as thebiblical David have accumulated a collective force through theirrepetition in rabbinical and liturgical texts and thus speak for themany generations of Jews. When Toybe Pan in seventeenth-century Praguewants to convince God of her own deep feelings, which are also thefeelings of her community, she adapts biblical Hebrew words into Yiddishmeter and rhyme. Quoting David's Psalms, Toybe Pan implies, withouta trace of hubris, an analogy between David the psalmist and Toy be Panthe poet. (26)

In stanza 50, Toybe Pan signs her name to the poem she has written.Like Royzl Fishls' last lines, Toybe Pan's follow theconventions of the day. With modesty, she precedes her name with thephrase, "Ven emets velt visn ver dos lid hot gimakht (If/ Whensomeone wants to know who made this song)." However, it is withartistry that she "makes" this final stanza, for she ensuresthat her name, her husband's, and her father's are placed intocarefully rhymed couplets, in keeping with the rest of the poem:

Ven emsts velt visn ver dos lid hot gimakht.Toybe eyshes KhMHVRR [khmhorer] [kvod moreynu hareynu harav reb] yankev pan hot es der trakht.Bas KhMHR"R [khmhorer] [kvod moreynu hareynu harav reb] leyb pitsker z"1.HaSh"Y [hashem yisborekh] zol uns bahitn al: [50](If someone wants to know who made this song.Toybe the wife of Our Honored Teacher and Master Rabbi Pan is the one.Daughter of Our Honored Teacher and Master Rabbi Leyb Pitsker, z"1.May God, His name be blessed, watch over us all.)

The first couplet rhymes gimakht (made) and der trakht(conceived/thought up), while the second couplet pairs the abbreviationz"l (zikhronov l'vrakha) (may his memory be to a blessing),pronounced zal, which follows after the name of the deceased, with al(all). These rhymed pairs summarize the story of the poem and itsmaking: The poem was both made (gimakht) with all the craft and skill ofan artisan, and invented, conceived, thought through (der trakht) byToybe Pan. The craft controlling the form and the intellectual acuitythat determined the meaning were both the work of the woman Toybe. LikeRoyzl Fishls, Toybe gives her lineage in the terms of her husband andher deceased father, defining herself as a writer by her connections toher closest male relatives, who also were learned men. The second rhymedcouplet links the past with the present, the dead with the living, forz"l (zal), the standard phrase that follows the name of thedeceased, connects the dead to the divine will, and to the ability of the living to remember. The rhyme of z"l with al-where al refers toall those still alive, all those who have survived the plague and forwhose sake Toybe Pan has written her poem-brings together the dead withthe living under the protection of "Father King."

Toybe Pan's poem, "Eyn sheyn lid," presents theextraordinary example of a woman who takes upon herself the role of thespeaker for the Jewish community, a role ordinarily held by men. As shesays, Toybe Pan takes on this role because the men who once performedthese tasks-the rabbi and the cantor-have died, and there seems to be noone else left to speak to God on behalf of the Jews of Prague. In thisway, Pan resembles Royzl Fishls, who also took on a male role, that ofprinter and publisher in the absence, it seems, of husband and father.Both these women appear to be exceptions in their learnedness, in theirliteracy, and in the ability and ease with which they performed theactivities and assumed the authority necessary to compose and leadprayer, to publish books, and to write poems.

In the Old Yiddish poems, then, the poet inserts her name into thepoem in order to establish her authorship and to describe her role inher community. In modern Yiddish poems, in contrast, the presence of thepoet's name within the verse becomes thematic and ironic andsignals a more complex role for the poet within the poem. For example,in Moyshe-Leyb Halpern's poem, "Memento Mori," publishedin New York in 1919, the poet and his alienation from his audiencebecome the subject and theme of the poem:

Un az moyshe-leyb, der poet vet dertseyln,az er hot dem toyt af di khvalyes gezen,azoy vi men zet zikh aleyn in a shipigl,un dos in der fri gor, azoy arum tsen--tsi vet men dos gleybn moysh-leybe?(And if Moyshe-Leyb, the poet, were to tellThat he has seen Death along the wavesJust as one sees oneself in the mirror,And it was in the morning, just around ten--Would anyone believe Moyshe-Leyb?) (27)

Halpern inserts his own first name into the first and fifth linesof each of the four stanzas to create Moyshe-Leyb der poet (Moyshe-Leybthe poet), a self-consciously caricatured figure who demonstrates thealienation of the Yiddish poet from his audience. This visionarymentshele, "little man," who, like a prophet, sees Deathpersonified on the waves at the beach and is drawn to that ordinary, yetdazzling specter, would, if he were to try, fail to convince any of thehundreds of people surrounding him of his vision's truth.Halpern's modernist poem works against accepted conventions: theliterary conventions of how and where the image of death appears and thesocial conventions of what the Yiddish poet's role should be.Prophetic as he may be, this poet, unlike Halpern's predecessors,the Yiddish Labor Poets, does not serve as spokesman for his presumedaudience, the people, the masses, but as an absurd soothsayer, afraid tospeak.

In contrast to their male contemporaries, including, besidesHalpern, Yankev Glatshteyn, in the poem "1919," which appearsin his 1921 book of poems, called Yankev Glatshteyn and Mani Leyb, in"Ikh bin" (I Am) (1932), the women modernists of the 1920s and1930s did not generally insert names into their poems. Or, to put thispoint a little differently, they did not put their own names in theirpoems, although at least one poet invented a persona when she could notname herself. The case in point is Anna Margolin in her "Mari"poems.

The highly textured poems of Anna Margolin (pseudonym for RosaLebensboym) employ "distancing devices" (28)--motifs ofsculpture and masks, passages that imitate Impressionistpaintings--which prevent the reader from assuming that the poem isdirect speech and emphasize the crafted, made nature of the poem.Moreover, this crafted poetry was further protected by the poet'spseudonym and by the many personae she invented as the speakers of herpoems. The opening poem of her 1929 volume Lider, one that at firstglance looks like an autobiographical confession, but instead of tellingthe story of a woman from Brest-Litovsk, the poem, "Ikh bin geven amol a yingling" (I Was Once A Boy), sums up the life of aGreco-Roman hom*osexual and incestuous man, for whom the Jews are but adistant rumor. (29) With this arsenal of tools and techniques torestrain the poet's identity and presence in the poems, it ishardly surprising that Margolin does not invoke her authorial name inher poems.

However, each of Margolin's seven "Mari" poems bearsthe name of its protagonist in its title, and this insistent repetitiondrums up an irony that draws attention to what it may be shielding:"Vos vilstu, mari?" (What do You Want, Mary?) "Maristfile," (Mary's Prayer), "Mari un der prister,"(Mary and the Priest), "Eynzame mart," (Lonely Mary),"Mart un di gest," (Mary and her Guests), "Mart vil zayna betlerin," (Mary Wants to Be a Beggar Woman), and "Mart under toyt" (Mary and Death). As Avrom Nowersztern suggests,Margolin's Mari persona may have "served the same purpose . .. as Moyshe Leyb Halpern's 'Moyshe Leyb.'" (30)While Halpern's ironic poet-character reflects the author and hisworld in a fun-house mirror, though, Margolin's Man personadeflects the image of the poet out of the poem. That the name Man orMary at least partly represents the Virgin Mary surfaces in at least twoof the poems ("Marts tfile"--Mary's Prayer--and"Mart un der prister"--Mary and the Priest) and onlyemphasizes Margolin' s dodging of explicit self-representation.(31)

Yet the issue at stake in these poems is that of a woman'sidentity in the world. At the outset, the poet asks repeatedly,"What do you want, Mary?" (Vos vilstu, mari?) And Mary answersby questioning her own humanity:

Bin ikh a mentsh, a bills, der umru fun di vegn,Oder di shvartse krekhtsndike erd?(Vos vilstu, mari? p. 95)(Am I a person, a lightning bolt, the restlessness of the roads,Or the black, groaning earth?)

Indeed, Mary's humanity is under scrutiny when, in the secondpoem, "Mans tfile," she is taken by God spiritually andsexually:

Un ikh hg afn rand fun der velt,Un du geyst fintster durkh mir vi di sho fun toyt.Geyst vi a breyte blitsndike shverd.(Maris tfile. p. 96)And I lie on the rim of the world,And you pass through me, dark as the hour of death,Pass like a broad, flashing sword.

In the third poem, "Mari un den prister," Mary isobjectified as a vessel--"a goblet of sacrificial wine,/A tender,rounded goblet of wine" waiting "To be smashed"/"Ona devastated altar."

In the fourth poem, Mary utters her own name as if to make surethat she exists, because the "people" among whom she findsherself do not acknowledge her identity:

Tsvishn mentshn iz zivi in midbar geven,flegt zi murmlen aleynir nomen: "Mari."(Eynzame mari, p. 98)(Among people, she isAs she was in the desert.Alone, she used to murmurHer name: "Mary.")

Although in the fifth poem Mary hosts a party for "dreamers,masters, slaves/ Whom she knew in the nights," she remainssolitary:

Zi iz aleyn. Bay a fremdn fest.Zi iz keyn mol nit geven mit zey farvebt.Zi hot ir lebn keyn mol nit gelebt.(Mari un di gest, p. 101)(She is alone. At an alien feast.She was never entangled with them.She never lived her life.)

Renouncing her house, her husband, her life, Mary in the sixth poemdecides to become a beggar woman:

Zayn a betlerin.Vi fun a shif, vos zinkt,Varfn ale oyters afn vint:Di last fun dayn libe un last fun di freydn,Un az ikh aleyn zol mer zikh nit derkonen--Oykh mayn gutn tsi mayn shlekhtn nomen.(Mari vil zayn a betlerin, p. 102)(To be a begger woman.As if from a sinking ship,To throw all treasures to the wind:The burden of your love and the burden of joys,And--when I no longer know who I am--Also my good or my bad name.)

Discarding the trappings of relationship--love and joy--the speakeralso rids herself of her reputation and her identity--her "good orbad name." Only through this shedding of social attributes does thespeaker imagine her desired freedom:

Shtum zikh sharn iber groye trotuarn,...Aynshlofn in gas under der zun,Vi in feld a mider zang,Vi a tseflikte blum,Vos iz farvelkt un umreyn,Un dokh getlekh,Un hot nokh alts a por sheyne zaydene bletlekh.Un oyflaykhtn mit krankn likht fun a lamtern,Zikh oyfviklen fun der shtumer groyer nakht,Vi a nepl fun nepl, vi a nakht fun der nakht.Vern a gebet un vern a flam.Zikh avekshenken tsertlekh, brenendik un groyzam.Un zayn eynzam,Vi nor kenign un betlers zaynen eynzam.Un umgliklekh.Un geyn azoy mit farvunderte oygnDurkh groyse soydesdike teg un nekhtTsum hoykhn gerikht,Tsum shmertslekhn likht,Tsu zikh.(Mari vil zayn a betlerin, pp. 102-103)(To scrape mutely across gray sidewalks,...To fall asleep in the street under the sun,Like a tired stalk in the field,Like a ragged flower,Faded, foul,And yet divine,With its remnant pair of beautiful, silken petals.And, illuminated by the sick light of a lantern,To unfold oneself from the mute, gray night,Like a mist from mist, like a night from the night.To become a plea and to become a flame.To give oneself away tenderly, burning and ruthless.And to be lonely,As only kings and beggars are lonely.And unhappy.And to walk with astonished eyesThrough great secretive days and nightsTo the high court,To the aching light,To the self.)

By discarding her name--the word by which she is known in societyand that also connotes her value within that society--the speaker of thepoem, Mary, can be alone in the city. Only without a name can she movetoward knowing who she is. This act of becoming nameless--even in a poemwhere the author's actual name is hidden by a pseudonym, and thatpseudonym is then masked by a persona--proves how far the modern womanwriter stands from Royzl Fishls and Toybe Pan, who inscribed themselvesinto their poems as a sign of their place in the community of Jews.Margolin so deliberately excludes her name from her poems that no nameappears even in the two bitter, brilliant versions of her epitaph. (32)

The fact that modernist women Yiddish poets do not state their ownnames in their poems may indicate how comparatively insecure they feelin the poetic world of their day, in contrast to their female medievalpredecessors, who were at home with their audience and in theircommunities. As secularists, the modernist women poets had broken out ofthe bindings of Jewish tradition, which, while restricting women'slives and choices, had provided a clear place from which the few whowrote could speak.

I will conclude with two examples of modern women poets who do namethemselves in their poems. They do so only by invoking Jewish traditionin the years immediately following the end of the Second World War.

Kadya Molodowsky's "Khad gadya" appears in her book,Der melekh dovid aleyn iz geblibn (Only King David Remained [New York,1946]). Molodowsky herself characterized the poems in this collection askhurbn-lider, destruction poems, and although "Khad gadya"does not address the destruction of Europe's Jews directly, it,too, is a khurbn-lid. Molodowsky models her poem on the famous Aramaicsong found at the end of the Passover Haggadah, in which a young childobserves and relates a chain of destruction and retribution. In eachstanza of the song, we are obliged to recite all the precedingevents--the small goat purchased for two zuzim, the cat that eats thegoat, the dog that bites, the stick that beats, the fire that burns, thewater that quenches, and so forth, until the butcher is slaughtered bythe Angel of Death, and the Angel of Death, by God. Thus we are remindedof the causal relationship of things in this world, how the chain ofcauses implies the hierarchy of power in nature, which itself impliesthe hierarchy of apocalyptic history. Innocent victims are ultimatelyavenged by the justice of the Almighty, who, we come to realize, haschoreographed the chain of vengeance for the death of the little goat.

Molodowsky's "Khad gadya" plays on this shift fromthe order of nature to the order of divine history. (33) The poem beginsas the speaker, a poet, confesses that she had stopped in the middle ofwriting a poem, because she failed to find a rhyme. Summarizing thishalf-finished poem, she tells "a story/Of a tall, gray man,"who stands at a window at dawn, humming and smoking his pipe. Theman's thoughts settle on details of a mundane life, characterizedby dinginess and boredom. Suddenly, though, the invented character stepsout of the discarded poem and into the poet's own world, accusingher "with resentment and fury" of having abandoned him and hisstory for no good reason. Examining this unruly creation of hers, thepoet gradually begins a process of recognition. She first recognizes thereality of what she has made and discarded, "the smoke of hispipe/And his gray unhappiness." Then she interprets theseattributes of her invented man--they become manifestations of theconundrum of human life--the entang led, eternal knot of experience; theunspoken word of unrealized possibility.

In the final stanza, she places her name:

Un oto hostu a khad gadya--Ikh leyen zi mit zingendikn trop,Ikh aleyn, vi mayn nomen iz kadya,Kuk fun shpigl, vi er, punkt arop. (34)(And there you have it, a "Khad Gadya"--I read it with the stress of the song,I myself, as my name is Kadya,Like him, from the mirror peer down.)

The poet sums up the poem: "un oto hostu a khad gadya,""And there you have it, a khad gadya." The Yiddish line soclosely imitates the Aramaic refrain, "veoto shunro veokhlolegadyo" ("And came the cat and ate the kid"), that itcan be sung in the traditional trop, or cantillation, as the poetself-consciously notes: "I read it with the stress of thesong." The line even begins with a bilingual pun, played by theYiddish adverb un oto ("and there") upon the Aramaic verbveoto ("and came"). And like the Aramaic, the Yiddish lineends with the word gadya (kid).

In the next line, the poet finds the rhyme that went missing at thepoem's beginning, in perhaps the only rhyme in Yiddish for gadya,her own name--Kadya. Momentarily this seems like a joke, but thesatisfying closure of the rhyme gives way to an unsettling vision of theself:

Ikh aleyn, vi mayn nomen iz kadya,Kuk fun shpigl, vi er, punkt arap.(I myself, as my name is Kadya,Like him, from the mirror peer down.)

The poem becomes a mirror reflecting the poet as the likeness ofthe man she once invented and tossed away. Whereas Halpern's"Moyshe-Leyb the poet" saw death "[j]ust as one seesoneself in the mirror," Molodowsky's "Kadya thepoet" sees herself in the mirror of her own creations--ahalf-realized character and the poem in which he has tried to resurrecthimself. She has tried to dismiss these creations as a khad gadya, an"idle tale" (in one colloquial Yiddish meaning of the phrase).She cannot free herself from what she has made, though, because she hascreated herself. She is the tall, gray man. She is also the kid. Kadyaherself is the gadya, her own idle tale and its victim. In the Passoversong, divine justice provides the rhyme and reason for the escalatingdestructions. In Molodowsky's poem, bound to a tradition thathistory has betrayed, there is imperfect rhyme, a bi-gendered self, andno justice, poetic or divine. Like Halpern, Molodowsky inserts her nameinto the poem ironically, but unlike Halpern , she connects her namethrough rhyme to communal tradition, to the Passover song, even as shedepicts the destruction of the Jewish world that sings that song andcomments on the situation of the Yiddish poet who writes in theaftermath.

In 1949, Rokhl Korn, a war refugee and recent emigrant to Canada,from Warsaw via the Soviet Union, published a poem called by her ownname, "Rokhl." (35) In this poem, Korn transforms a memory ofher mother reciting a tkhine about the Matriarch Rachel into her ownlife's disrupted story. Blurring the distinction between thebiblical character and the modern poet-speaker, Korn protests thesufferings incurred by European antisemitism during the twentiethcentury. In the Polish countryside of Korn's girlhood, beneathcherry blossoms, the young girl Rokhl listens as her mother reads alouda Yiddish tkhine. She weeps, for the words of the prayer make her feelas if she were Rachel at the well, awaiting Jacob. As her mother chantsthe tkhine, the girl experiences Rachel's death in childbirth andthe journey to her grave, "Over Bethlehem's stone-hard,desolate roads." The young Rokhl takes the words of the tkhine toheart, identifying fully with the biblical character with a piousnaivete:

nor oyb s'iz take vor, az s' shtarbn yungerheytdi, velkhe got aleyn farkast un oysderveylthot durkh a kush in shtern in sho funem geboyrntsu groyser libshaft un tsu groysn layd,dan vil ikh shtarbn oykh azoy, vi yene[.] (36)(But if it's really true, die youngWhom God himself has betrothed and chosenWith a kiss on the brow at the hour of birthFor great love and great suffering,Then I, too, want to die this way,like them.

The speaker reasons that she shares Rachel's fate or earlydeath and chosenness because of their common name: "Because I bearher name, it has nursed us for a single destiny." The doublereference of the name Rokhl to past and present has made the girlreflect upon what the future holds for her as she stands, alone in thegarden, near the bench where her mother has left her prayer book. Inthis moment of apparent harmony, when the Yiddish prayer has made thegirl's life one with the biblical story, the poem itself seemsabout to join the real with the legend: "The clay pitcher is fullof water clear and cool,/ And my left hand tilts it toward the lips ofthe dream." But Rokhl does not drink. History brings not Jacob, buta pogromist, Ivan, armed and ready to rape. Drawing upon Yiddishdevotions, tkhines like those that Royzl Fishls and Toybe Pan recited intheir daily lives, Korn fashions her own name into a trope. Like Halpem,Korn places her name at the poem's center. Like Molodowsky, Kornmakes her name th e point at which tradition ruptures.

Is it coincidental that in the two post-war poems by Molodowsky andKorn, these rare occasions of a modem poet's self-naming accompanythe nexus of the evocation of a traditional text (the Passover song andthe Yiddish prayer) with a poetic moment in which reality seems to mergewith the imaginary world? The tall, gray man of the discarded poem stepsinto the poet's world and looks back at the poet from the mirror,displacing her own face. The pitcher of cool water, from the tklzine's version of the biblical story, almost quenches the thirst of theyoung girl awaiting an actual embrace from the textual Jacob. It may notbe too far-fetched to posit that the historical moment following thegreat destruction of Europe's Jews locates the juncture of the textand the actual, of survival itself in the Yiddish poet's name.

Conclusion:

The appearance of a poet's name in a poem signals a centralissue in Jewish writing: the question of to what degree the individualwriter speaks for her/himself or for the community. In Old Yiddishpoems, the modem idea of the individual writer is not present When thepoet signs her name--Rivke Tiktiner in an acrostic; Royzl Fishls andToybe Pan in a rhymed stanza--she carves her name into her prayer orproem according to convention, that is, the convention of signatureestablished by medieval Hebrew liturgical poems, the convention ofnaming herself as a woman linked to Jewish learning through her maleancestors, and the convention that each Jew is a member of and voice forthe Jewish people awaiting messianic redemption. While the poet signingher name to a poem claims the distinction of authorship and itsattendant authority, that distinction presumes the author's placewithin the Jewish community and its conventions, both literary andreligious. Rivke Tiktiner, Royzl Fishls, and Toybe Pan sign their poemsin the same spirit that they assume their place in life, as defined byJewish law, and in time, as defined by sacred history.

In contrast, when modern women poets place their names in a Yiddishpoem, they inscribe themselves into a different world. The pre-modernconvention of signing a poem within its lines is no longer necessary,for the lyric poem in Yiddish has come to be identified with anindividual writer whose by-line follows the poem in a newspaper or onthe title page of a book. As the modem woman Yiddish poet pulls awayfrom traditional Jewish life into the secular world, the tension growsbetween her responsibilities to voice the will of the Jewish people andher own desires. The lyric poem becomes an analogue for the individualperson, yet vestiges of communal responsibility linger in its Yiddishlanguage and culture. When the modern poet inserts her name into thepoem, her allusion to past conventions of Jewish poetry calls attentionto both the unstable position of Jewish tradition in the modem world andthe risk involved as women redefine what it means to be a Jew.

(1.) This article is drawn from my book-in-progress, "AQuestion of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish." I am grateful tothe John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for a fellowship during1999-2000, when I worked on this book. An earlier version was firstpresented as the plenary address at the Conference on Women'sYiddish Voices, sponsored by the University of Southern CaliforniaCenter for Feminist Research and Yiddishkayt, Los Angeles, February 25,2001, and again at the University of Illinois at Chicago, March 20,2001.

(2.) Alex Preminger, Frank J. Warnke, and O. B. Hardison, Jr.,eds., Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1965), pp. 4-5.

(3.) Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, p. 4.

(4.) T. Carmi, Introduction, The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, ed.and trans. T. Carmi (New York: Penguin, 1981), pp. 14-15.

(5.) T. Carmi, Introduction, Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, p. 18.

(6.) T. Carmi, translator, "Moses' Journey ThroughHeaven," by Amittai Ben Shephatiah, Penguin Book o f Hebrew Verse,pp. 23 8-239.

(7.) Reb. Zelmelin, "Shabes-lid," in M. Bassin, ed.,Antologye: Finf hundert yor yidishe poezye (New York: Farlag Dos YidisheBukh), 1917, vol. 1, pp. 8-9.

(8.) M. Bassin, Finf hundert yor yidishe poezye, vol. 1, footnote,p. 8.

(9.) Israel Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, Volume 7, OldYiddish Literature from its Origins to the Haskalah Period, trans.Bernard Martin (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, and New York:KTAV, 1975), p. 41. Another example of a Yiddish acrostic is cited involume 7 of A History of Jewish Literature, where Israel Zinbergdiscusses one Zalman Sofer, who also lived in the first half of thefifteenth century, and quotes a stanza from both his Hebrew and Yiddishversions of a poem, "Zera gefen," on the controversy betweenwater and wine, in which he weaves an acrostic, "ZalmanSofer."

(10.) Merecina of Gerona, "[Blessed, Majestic andTerrible]," trans. Peter Cole, in Shirley Kaufman, GalitHasan-Rokem, Tamar S. Hess, eds., The Defiant Muse: Hebrew FeministPoems (New York: The Feminist Press, 1999), p. 65.

(11.) Zelda Newman, Ashkenaz: Its Language and Culture, unpublishedtypescript in progress, May, 2000. Khone Shmeruk, Sifrut yidish bpolin(Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1981), pp. 66-69. Also see IsraelZinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, vol. 7, pp. 285-286.

(12.) Israel Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, vol. 7, p.241.

(13.) Elijah Bakhur (Elye Bokher; Elia Levita) (1469-1549)concluded his Yiddish adaptation of a popular Italian chivalric romance,Bove-bukh (published in Isny, 1541), with a stanza that gives his nameand the date of composition:

"But I wish to indicateWho made and wrote this book;He is called Elijah Bahur.A whole year he spent on itAnd made it in the yearThat is numbered 5267 (1507).He finished it in Nissan and began it in Iyyar.May God protect us from all evil beasts."

Quoted in Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, vol. 7, p. 69.For biographical details, see A. A. Roback, The Story of YiddishLiterature (New York: YIVO, 1940), pp. 59-60.

(14.) Note that Sore has Tovim wrote her name into acrostic in herTkhine of the Three Gates (written after 1732, according to ChavaWeissler, Voices of the Matriarchs. Listening to the Prayers of EarlyModern Jewish Women [Boston: Beacon Press, 1999)), although thisacrostic did not survive in all editions of the tkhine. She also signedher name and lineage into the end of the tkhine, as Rozyl Fishls andToybe Pan do.

(15.) Royzl Fishis, "Mit hoylf gots yas "in Ezra Korman,Yidishe dikhterins: antologye (Women Yiddish Poets: Anthology) (Chicago:Farlag L. M. Stein), 1928, pp. 5-6. English translation by KathrynHellerstein.

(16.) Shmuel-bukh refers to a popular Biblical and Midrashic epicpoem about the heroic King David, of disputed authorship (either bySanvl the Scribe or Moyshe Esri ve-Arbe), composed probably in the latefifteenth century and first published in 1544. For a standard discussionof the Shmuel-bukh, see Israel Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature:Old Yiddish Literature from its Origins to the Haskalah Period, Vol.7,pp. 107-115. For a refutation of Zinberg, see Chone Shmeruk, "Canthe Cambridge Manuscript Support the Spielmann Theory in YiddishLiterature?" Studies in Yiddish Literature and Folklore (Jerusalem:Research Projects of the Institute of Jewish Studies, Monograph Series7, Hebrew University, 1986), pp. 1-36.

(17.) According to Naomi Seidman, in A Marriage Made in Heaven: TheSexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1997), p. 3, "Such Yiddish texts would typicallyopen with an apologetic introduction explaining the necessity of writingin Yiddish for those who were ignorant of Hebrew, a social categoryoften referred to in some variation of the phrase, 'women andsimple people."' Max Weinreich records a few examples:"For women and men who are like women, that is, they areuneducated, for men and women, lads and maidens, and for women andmen," in Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, trans.Shlomo Nobel and Joshua Fishman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,[1973], 1980), p.276. Also see Chava Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs,pp. 54-59.

(18.) Levite line refers to one of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, theTribe of Levi, whose descendents assisted the priests in the ancientTemples of Jerusalem. Levi was the name of a famous rabbinical family insixteenth-century Ludmir.

(19.) Bar is the abbreviation of the Hebraic bas reb, which means"the daughter of Mister ..." Thus the name Royzl bar Fishlnames the poet as "Royzl the daughter of Mr. Fishl," which hasthe same meaning as Royzl Fishls, "Fishls" being thepossessive case of the name Fishl.

(20.) One can speculate that "Fishls" may be Royzl'smarried name, the name of her husband, or, less likely, the name of hermother.

(21.) Encyclopaedia Judaica--CD-ROM Edition (Judaica Multimedia(Israel) Ltd.), "Vladimir Volynski."

(22.) The dating of Old Yiddish texts is a highly complex process,and thus the date of composition of Toybe Pan's poem is uncertain.Korman dates it seventeenth century, with a question mark (Yidishedikhterins: antologye, p. 7). In a conversation at the Hebrew Universityon June 13, 2000, Professor Chava Tumiansky told me that she believesToybe Pan's poem was composed and published in the early eighteenthcentury.

(23.) Toybe Pan, "Eyn sheyn lid naye gemakht/b'loshntkhines iz vardin oys getrakht," in Ezra Korman, ed., Yidishedikhterins: antologye (Women Yiddish Poets: Anthology) (Chicago: FarlagL. M. Stein, 1928), pp. 7-17. English translation by KathrynHellerstein.

(24.) The variant is found in a microfilm negative at the JewishNational Library at the Hebrew University, in Givat Ram, OPP 8 1103(34), bar code 6011538560115, titled, "Eyn naye lid gimakhtb'loshn tkhine iz vardn oys gitrakht, b'nigun akeyde,"from the Bodleian Library, at Oxford University.

(25.) Korman (Yidishe dikhterins: antologye, p. xxxvii) comments onthe variant text: "In the variant, B'nign akeyde' (To themelody of 'The Binding of Isaac'), the beginning of the firstline is altered. Instead of 'Her got' (Lord God), it reads,'Foter kinig almekhtiger' (Father Almighty King), and therefrain comes at the beginning of every stanza, instead of at the end.(This was done both according to the new beginning, and the technicalequipment of a sentence, to which, in past times, apparently not muchattention was given)."

(26.) The fact that Royzl Fishls' poem also centered onDavid's Psalms suggests that King David the psalmist is acompelling example for later Jewish poets, perhaps especially women. Themodern Hebrew poet Esther Raab invokes King David as a fellow poet inher poem, "Holy Grandmothers in Jerusalem," trans. ShirleyKaufman, in Shirley Kaufman, Galit Hasan-Rokem, Tamar S. Hess, eds., TheDefiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poets from Antiquity to the Present (NewYork: The Feminist Press at CUNY), 1999, pp. 92-93.

(27.) Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, "Memento Mori," in New York: ASelection, trans. Kathryn Hellerstein (Philadelphia: Jewish PublicationSociety, 1982), pp. 80-81.

(28.) Avrom Nowersztern, "'Who Would Have Believed that aBronze Statue Can Weep': The Poetry of Anna Margolin," trans.Robert Wolf, in Anna Margolin, Lider, ed. Avrom Nowersztern (Jerusalem:Magnes Press, 1991), pp. xxxiii-xxxv.

(29.) Anna Margolin, Lider, ed. Avrom Nowersztern (Jerusalem:Magnes Press, 1991), p. 3. All Margolin poems are cited from thisedition. English translations are by Kathryn Hellerstein.

(30.) Nowersztern, "Who Would Have Believed," p. xiii.

(31.) Kathryn Hellerstein, "Translating as a Feminist:Reconceiving Anna Margolin," Prooftexts 20, (Winter 2000), pp.91-108.

(32.) version of Margolin's epitaph is inscribed on hergravestone in New York. See Anna Margolin, Lider, ed. Nowersztern,Epitaf, p. 58, and Zi mit di kalte marmorne brist, p. 136. For adiscussion of the two versions of her epitaph, see Naomi Seidman,lecture on Anna Margolin's epitaphs (and other Yiddish poets'gravestones), delivered at the Ninth Annual Symposium of the Philip M.and Ethel Klutznick Chair in Jewish Civilization at CreightonUniversity, Omaha, Nebraska (October 27-28, 1996).

(33.) The section on Kadya Molodowsky's "Khad gadya"is adapted from my article, "The Yiddish Poet's Response tothe Khurbn: Kadya Molodowsky in America," in Rela M. Geffen andMarcia B. Edelman. eds., Freedom and Responsibility: Exploring theDillemmas of Jewish Continuity (New York: Ktav, 1998), pp. 233-249.

(34.) Kadya Molodowsky, "Khad gadya," in Paper Bridges:Selected Poems of Kadya Molodowky, translated, edited, and introduced byKathryn Hellerstein (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), pp.382-385.

(35.) The section on Rokhl Korn's "Rokhl" is adaptedfrom my article, "The Metamorphosis of the Matriarchs in ModernYiddish Poetry," in Leonard Jay Greenspoon, ed., Yiddish Language& Culture Then & Now (Omaha: Creighton University Press, 1998),pp. 201-231.

(36.) Rokhl Korn, "Rokhl," Bashertkayt: Lider 1928-1948(Montreal: Montreal Committee, 1949), pp. 100-101. One finds atransliteration and English translation by Kathryn Hellerstein, in"The Metamorphosis of the Matriarchs in Modem Yiddish Poetry,"pp. 224-226.

Kathryn Hellerstein is senior Lecturer in Yiddish and JewishStudies at the University of Pennsylvania. Hellerstein's booksinclude her translation and study of Moyshe-Leyb Halpern's poems,In New York: A Selection (Jewish Publication Society, 1982), PaperBridges: Selected Poems of Kadya Molodowsky (Wayne State UniversityPress, 1999), and Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, ofwhich she is co-editor (W. W. Norton, 2000). Her current projectsinclude Anthology of Women Yiddish Poets and a critical book, A Questionof Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, supported in 1999-2000 by afellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation.