Publisher Description

Kadya Molodowsky, the most prolific woman writer of Yiddish, wrote an autobiographical memoir that left many questions unanswered. Why does she say of her wedding day only that she wore new shoes and fell in the snow? Did she join those who saw communism as the answer to the Jewish problem? Why did she leave Israel after having spent only three years there? It took Zelda Kahan Newman's research at three archives, the YIVO archive in New York, the Municipal Jewish Library in Montreal, and the Machon Lavon archive in Ne'ot Afeka, Israel, to discover the answers to these questions. In this biography, Kahan Newman covers the arc of Molodowsky's life, a life that saw pogroms, World War I, an escape from Europe to the United States, and an attempt to revive Yiddish culture after World War II. Finally, as Kahan Newman notes, it was an ironic twist of fate "that Kadya's death was noted in the U.S., where she felt increasingly alien, and ignored in Israel, where she felt she belonged, if only in spirit.

Author Biography

Zelda Kahan Newman is retired from Lehman College/CUNY. She has written academic papers on Talmudic chant and Hassidic Yiddish. She is the English language translator of the Yiddish poet Rivka Basman Ben-Haim and has published a dual-language book titled The Thirteenth Hour, with the poet's original Yiddish poems alongside Kahan Newman's English translations

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