Sarah Reyzen

Born in Koidanov, Russian Empire (today Dzyarzhynsk, Belarus), Sarah Reyzen received an education that included both traditional instruction and exposure to German and Russian. She moved to Minsk in 1899 and worked as a seamstress, publishing her first literary works a few years later. Becoming involved with the Yiddish literary circles of Minsk, Vilna, and Warsaw, Reyzen contributed prose and poetry to regional newspapers such as Di folkstsaytung, a Bundist paper, as well as Yiddish periodicals in London and New York, including the Forverts. An active translator, especially in the decade following World War I, Reyzen translated several important pieces of world literature into Yiddish, including works by Leo Tolstoy and Rabindranath Tagore. She produced popular children’s books as well, both original stories and translations. She was the sister of the pioneering Yiddish writer and socialist intellectual Avrom Reyzen (Reisen) and of Zalmen Reyzen, a leading Yiddishist and Diasporist activist in interwar Polish Vilna.