Kadya Molodowsky: The Life of a Jewish Woman Writer, 2nd Revised Edition

Author: 

Newman, Zelda Kahan

Credentials: 

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

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.”

Market: 
Literature, History, Jewish Studies, Jewish History, Jewish Literature, Women’s Studies, Yiddish Studies, Yiddish Literature, American Studies, American History, Religion, Religious History, World Literature, European Literature,
Release Date: 
October 15, 2021
ISBN: 
978-1680537338 Hardcover
Price: 
$99.95
Trim Size: 
6x9
Pages: 
264
Illustrations: 
None
Publisher: 

ACADEMICA PRESS
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