A White Poet

The Yiddish poet Kadya Molodovsky was born in Bereza Kartuska, a small town in Belarus, where she received a broad Hebrew and secular education. She taught in Jewish schools and children’s homes in Poland and Russia, both before and after World War I, and produced celebrated Yiddish children’s verse that continues to delight Israeli children in Hebrew translation. In 1935, she joined the expatriate Polish-Yiddish colony of writers in New York, where the focus of her poetry shifted; she was sensitive to the problematic status of women in traditional Jewish life, as well to as her own role as a creative writer. She also voiced the plight of impoverished Jewish workers and their families. Molodovsky, along with her husband Simkhe Lev, published a little magazine, Svive (Surroundings), which provided a forum for a number of important writers, including Isaac Bashevis Singer, and in which she serialized her autobiography.