Izabella

The daughter of the Hebrew author Har Shalom (Abraham Friedberg), Beyle Friedberg (her birth name) received a maskilic education and wrote her first poetry and prose in German and Russian. Active in literary circles in St. Petersburg, she married the Yiddish writer Mordkhe Spektor in 1886 and soon thereafter moved to Warsaw. There, taking the pen name Izabella, she published her first Yiddish stories in 1888 in Der hoyz-fraynd (“The Orphan”) and Der familyen-fraynd (“A Groom on the Installment Plan” and “Among Strangers”). She also published in Y. L. Peretz’s pioneering Yidishe bibliotek in 1891. In the mid-1890s, having divorced Spektor and moved back to St. Petersburg, she began writing plays in Russian under the name Izabella Arkadevna Grinevskaya. One of these, Bab ed-din (1903), dramatized the life of the founder of the Baha’i faith, which she herself adopted. In addition to prose and drama, Izabella wrote essays, articles, an autobiography in Kniga i revoliutsiia (1923) and translated prolifically into Russian from Armenian, French, Georgian, German, Italian, and Polish.