Kadia Molodowsky (1894–1975)

Kadia Molodowsky was born in the Russian province of Grodino (now Belarus). She learned to read in Yiddish from her grandfather. Her father, a teacher in a cheder, instructed Kadia in Hebrew and the Old Testament, and hired tutors to teach her Russian language, geography, philosophy, and world history. Such an education was extremely rare for a girl of her era. Kadia obtained a teaching certificate and taught in Sherpetz and in Bialystok. In 1916-1917, she lived in Odessa, where she taught kindergarten and studied elementary education. At the start of the Bolshevik Revolution, she tried to return to her parents' home, but was stopped in Kiev. She published her first poem in 1920, after surviving a major anti-Semitic pogrom in Kiev. In 1921, she married Simkhe Lev, a scholar and teacher. The couple lived in Warsaw, and Kadia taught by day in a Jewish elementary school and in the evenings at a Jewish community school. She was active in the Yiddish Writers Union, where she met other writers from Warsaw, Vilna, and the USA. Kadia published her first book of poetry in 1927, Kheshvendike Nekht (Nights of Heshvan), followed by Dzshike gas (Dzshike Street, 1933) which received critical acclaim in the Yiddish press. In 1935, she emigrated to the USA, settling in New York City; her husband joined her a couple of years later. She began to write short stories, essays, children's poems, novels, plays, and a column for The Jewish Daily Forward, in which she used the pseudonym Rivke Zilberg. She co-founded the literary journal Svive (Surroundings), which she edited for nearly 30 years. In 1944, with her family still in Europe, she wrote Der Melekh Dovid Aleyn Iz Geblibn (Only King David Remained, 1946). She later edited an anthology, Lider fun Khurbm (Poems of the Holocaust, 1962). From 1948 to 1952, Kadia and her husband lived in Israel. She wrote her autobiography, Fun Mayn Elter-zeydns Yerushe (From My Great-Grandfather’s Inheritance), which appeared serially in Svive between 1965 and 1974. In 1971, Molodowsky received the Itzik Manger Prize, the most prestigious award in the world of Yiddish letters.