Roshelle Weprinsky (1895–1981)

Roshelle Weprinsky was born to an impoverished Jewish family in the town of Ivankiv in the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine). She attended a religious elementary school and a Russian Jewish school in Kiev. Around the age of 12, after her father’s death, she immigrated with her mother and siblings to the USA, settling in New York City. There she began working in sweatshops. At age 15, after attending evening school, and influenced by the so-called Sweatshop Poets who wrote about the workers and their families, Weprinsky started writing poems and short stories. Her poetry was published for the first time in 1918 in Di Naye Velt, a popular American Yiddish publication. She then contributed poems to many other Yiddish periodicals, including the Jewish Daily Forward (Forverts) and the literary magazine Shriftn. She published her first book of poems, Ruf fun fligl (Call of Wings) in 1926. She went on to publish four more volumes of poetry and an autobiographical novel, Dos kraytsn fun di hent (The Crossing of Hands, 1971). She was active in the trade union movement and later became an executive of the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union. Weprinsky had a long passionate relationship with fellow Yiddish poet Mani Leib (Brahinsky). From the 1920s until his death in 1953, they lived together, having both left their spouses, and may have gotten married. After Leib's death, she edited a compilation of poems and letters, published with her introduction as Briv: 1918-1953 (1980). Her story ​"By a Far Shore" was included in the anthology Have I Got a Story for You: More Than a Century of Fiction from the Forward, published in 2017.