Once I Was Young

Although she published only one collection of poetry in her lifetime, Anna Margolin (pseudonym of Rosa Lebensboym) is widely considered one of the most important Yiddish writers of twentieth-century America. A native of Brest (Brisk, in Yiddish, present-day Belarus), Margolin lived in Warsaw, Western Europe, and Palestine before settling permanently in New York in 1914. There she began a successful career writing for the Yiddish press and was a firmly established member of the city’s Yiddish intellectual circles. Her poetry is modernist in style and tone, rooted in European and American intellectual traditions, and often incorporates themes of love, loss, and alienation from a woman’s perspective. She belonged to no one literary group or political party.