Rukhl Fishman (1935–1984)

Rukhl or Rokhl Fishman was raised in a secular Yiddish-speaking Jewish home. Her parents, Aaron and Sonia Fishman, were dedicated activists in local Yiddish language circles. Her brother Joshua Aaron Fishman became a prominent linguist. Rukhl attended Workmen's Circle elementary and high school from 1941-1949. Her early Yiddish writing efforts were encouraged by the poet Malka Heifetz Tussman in Los Angeles, California, where the family moved in 1949. While in Los Angeles, Rukhl became active in the Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatsair and attended agricultural training courses in New York and New Jersey. In 1954, at age 19, she married Theodor Holdheim, a mathematician and musician who had come to the USA as a representative of Hashomer Hatsair. They moved to his kibbutz in Israel, Kibbutz Bet-Alpha, and adopted two sons, in 1964 and 1967. Rukhl Fishman loved the outdoor agricultural work on the kibbutz, which came to influence much of her poetry. She was the youngest and only American-born member of the Yiddish-language group Yung Yisroel, composed of young poets and writers from across the world who settled in lsrael after World War II, and often published in its journal of the same name. Her work was also published in the leading Yiddish literary journal, Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain). Rukhl Fishman spent the year 1972 in Jerusalem taking private lessons with scholar Yudl Mark and courses in Yiddish and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University. In 1978 she won the prestigious Itzik Manger Prize for Yiddish Literature. In about 1957, she began to show signs of an illness that was eventually diagnosed as Lupus. Her husband was also frequently ill during these years. Rukhl published four volumes of poetry during her lifetime. A selection of her work in Yiddish and English translation, Azoy vil ikh faln (I Want To Fall Like This) was published in 1994 by Wayne State University Press.