Sarah Shapira

Sarah Shapira was born in Dvinsk in the Russian Empire (today Daugavpils, Latvia). Her father was a doctor and a publicist who wrote in Hebrew and was acquainted with Judah Leib Gordon. Unusually for her day and age, Shapira acquired fluency in Hebrew and took part in the emerging world of modern Hebrew letters. In 1887, she published the poem “Tsiyon” in the Warsaw almanac Keneset Yisra’el. Four years later, the poem was turned into a song and became popular among Ḥibat Tsiyon circles. In the 1890s, Shapira published articles in the Hebrew weekly Ha-Melits. She lived in Odessa, worked as a teacher, and took part in the Ḥoveve Tsiyon movement. Judah Leib Gordon dedicated four poems to her. After the October Revolution (1917), Shapira moved to Moscow and worked in the department of Jewish books at the Lenin Library.