The Circus Lady

The Yiddish poet Celia Dropkin was born Zipporah Levine in Bobruisk, Belorussia, where she received both a religious and secular education. While continuing her studies in Kiev, she met the Hebrew writer Uri Nissan Gnessin, who encouraged her literary ambition. In 1909, she married a Bund activist, who fled to the United States the following year to escape government prosecution. She joined him in New York, where she lived for the rest of her life, in 1912. In the 1920s and 1930s, her poems, whose explicit sexuality was shocking at the time, appeared in avant-garde Yiddish periodicals. By undermining conventions, her work expanded the range of themes that were thought appropriate for female writers.