Kadya Molodowsky: The Life of a Yiddish Woman Writer

Based on detailed archival research in three countries, Zelda Kahan Newman tells the never-before told story of an extraordinarily talented woman writer of Yiddish who lived through all the major cataclysms of the twentieth century. A feminist before feminism was a movement, Molodowsky wrote poems that still circulate today. This is the fascinating story of the most prolific woman-writer of Yiddish.

Starting with Molodowsky’s life in the small town in what is now Belarus, it follows her as she gets an unusual education, joins European revivers of Hebrew, gets caught up in a pogrom, and is discovered asa writer. From there it takes us to her marriage with the man she lived with all her life, to their interwar life in Warsaw, and from there to the United States. After a three-year stay in the young state of Israel, Molodowsky returned to the USA, where she lived out her life.

Her work in all of these venues is discussed in light of the changes she herself underwent as she aged. Finally, the reader gets to see the gripping ironies of this writer’s life: hailed in the country that would abandon her language, and ignored in the country she valued dearly.