women-authors-from-poland

"Restless rains ruffled the orchard, And we've been in this war for quite a few years. We'll go home, we'll light the stove, We'll feed the dog. We will make it before nightfall, only we will win, And this is an important game."

"And I prefer my mother, who has hair like ink, golden eyes like my teddy bear, and she cried this morning."

"And I fell in love so terribly that, for example, I asked him to dance. It was the song "When I dance with you, the world smiles" and he turned me down. I immediately decided to commit suicide. And I remember that I decided to poison myself with gas. I let off the gas and decided to say goodbye to life. And then my mother called out "Agnieszka" or "Agusiu, soup on the table." And I moaned with the dying voice of a siren: "What soup?" And I heard from the kitchen: "Tomato soup." I decided to eat one more meal before I died and somehow this soup strengthened me so much that I am still alive today."

"But I wonder why I was wandering around like that. Instead of celebrating love, instead of gushing about it, I was so nervous because I thought that I would just make it, that I would always be young, that Marek would always be young, that the world would wait for us. And nothing waited and the world was rushing at a dizzying pace."

"Long live the ball, because this life is a ball above all balls, long live the ball, they won't invite us a second time, the orchestra is playing, they are still dancing and the doors are open, the day is worth the day and this life is worth the effort!"

"Every morning since I left you has been still, so radiant and fragrant and free, then turning out tasteless once I bite into the old tangerine discrepancy between frenzy and dullness. See, I’m your stupid tooth—made explicitly to break you into pieces. Now I’m unemployed, working harder than ever. Now I keep a cow tooth in my wallet, for luck, and much more of the whole skull in my subconscious, for some sense of riddleage in this cosmos, zones of mystical cartilage, I don’t know, I want to be superstitious."

"Have I been hard on you, myself, have I been hard on myself like a pestle in good hands, crushing the required pepper?"

"His wife called me sikorka, tit, as in the bird with the blue head and lime belly. She took care of me sometimes."

": Niby to u nas nie ma kokot w kamienicy. Sama mamcia wynajmowała tej z pierwszego piętra. (z godnością): Ale się jej nie kłaniam. : Ale pieniążki za czynsz mamcia bierze od niej, że aż ha... : Przepraszam, ja takich pieniędzy dla siebie nie biorę. : A co mamcia z nimi robi? (majestatycznie): Podatki nimi płacę."

"Jeden Judasz drugiego za pieniądze sprzedaje."

"Ja tam nie mam czasu myśleć."

"Oj, czasy! czasy nastały. Ani paszy dla bydła, ani uczciwości ludzkiej."

"Każda kobieta to fortepian – tylko trzeba umieć grać."

"Dla męża, mój panie, kobieta się nie potrzebuje pod spodem stroić."

"A niech was wszyscy diabli!!!"

"Kobieta powinna przejść przez życie cicho i spokojnie."

"A przestań się malować, bo wyglądasz jak kamienica odnowiona na przyjazd cesarza."

"Skromność – skarb dziewczęcia."

"Na to mamy cztery ściany i sufit, aby brudy swoje prać w domu i aby nikt o nich nie wiedział."

"Śmierć na wszystko pomoże."

"Gdzie widziałaś uczciwą kobietę z rudymi włosami?"

"Bo zgodziłam się z życiem i kradnę to, co jest najmilszego. To jest szczyt mądrości."

"W porządnej kamienicy wypadki się nie trafiają."

"Wielka afera – zagoi się do wesela."

"Każdy samobójca musi być szalony i stracić poczucie moralności i wiary w obecność Boga."

"Dla kobiety nie ma, jak dom."

"Moje sumienie jest czyste i nie boję się dnia białego."

"In Poland one of the most outstanding of these neoclassical poets was Rachel Korn (who finally came to live in Canada), who writes with a deceptive simplicity, a pure lyricism."

"the three most outstanding representatives of the Yiddish-Canadian literary group: J.I. Segal, Melekh Ravitch, and Rokhl Korn. Their presence in Canada corresponds to the most fruitful period of Yiddish-Canadian cultural life."

"what, in essence, is poetry. To me it seems that it is a magical transporter through time and space because it manages to contain the present, the past, even the future. Poetry is also the only literary medium that allows for the deformation of reality in service of artistic vision while at the same time endowing that vision with a marked purpose defined by all the attributes of reality."

"a great poet or artist is no coincidence in the history of a people. He is the logical consequence of historical developments, a product of ceaseless labor that has lasted generations. Centuries are spent toiling in the dark laboratory of the national subconscious in order to produce such a perfect individual who could become the people’s memory, its tongue, and—its conscience. His rise may not be attributed only to himself but rather, should be considered an answer to the nation’s concealed questioning of its own fears, of its own dreams. Only then, when the people itself is creative, when it searches and struggles, when it collects its debts from itself alone, the answer comes—in the form of a tremendous poetic talent."

"Like a spoiled rich child, the meager stream of honored cream flowed out of a narrow tube, while the common thin milk, its essence taken from it, gushed out of the larger tube in a rush."

"my mother’s special wish that the oven should be “really remarkable,” as if the rest of the house were only an addition to the oven, as if all her thoughts and dreams would warm themselves there."

"Often the poet will take faded words, lying forgotten and cobwebbed. He shakes off their dust, collected over generations, and marries them off to new images. He conducts them to a new breyshis, a second genesis. He also sets words as witnesses to the eternal struggle between justice and injustice, between purity and impurity."

"I was born and raised on a farm, ringed with fields and forests, where even to arrive at the nearest village was a serious journey, especially for a child’s tiny feet. I had no friends. Instead of friends, I had trees, and I spoke to them."

"In modern Yiddish writing, the moral, spiritual, and emotional capital of generations of Jewish women was utilized by male and female writers alike...Female prose writers, such as Fradl Shtok, Esther Kreitman, Rokhl Korn, Kadia Molodowsky, and Khava Rosenfarb, also deepened the awareness and understanding of the feminine contribution to Jewish civilization...In the realm of poetry, four female writers deserve special mention: Miriam Ulinover, Kadia Molodowsky, Rokhl Korn, and Rajzel Zychlinsky...Rokhl Korn grew up in the Galician countryside, spent the war years in the Soviet Union, and emigrated to Canada in 1948. Her early stories and poems emphasized rootedness in nature and the landscape of her childhood, while her later work stressed rootlessness and homelessness. Her poetry excels in brevity and the deft utilization of silence. Hers is one of the major lyrical voices in modern Yiddish poetry. Of particular excellence are the poems about her mother, her love poems, and her poems about the Holocaust and the reborn Israel."

"To be able to one day change a harsh reality, we need to know how to define what needs to be changed and how to effect change. To cope with situations in life-both personal and public-we need to have a real picture of these situations and of their possible outcomes. We need to know the price of each and who will pay it in the end. To know that every act and every error has consequences. To reduce to a minimum the possibility that someone-the regime, or the press, or the local leadership-will deceive us, cram us with false "facts" that are appropriate to whoever is making use of them. To make quite sure that, in the highest possible percentage of cases, we can make our own decisions and not let someone else think for us. All these things require a constant and precise mapping of reality. In other words, they require information about what exists and what is possible."

"The word "teacher" does not mean a person who "presents" a lesson (what an awful expression!), who is responsible for the pupils' being able to quote a few details and dates. A teacher-if he or she is also an educator-is responsible for seeing that most of the pupils in his or her class leave school as autonomous individuals, capable of independent thinking and decisive and discriminating behavior. For a person to be able to make autonomous decisions (read: to be a proper citizen), he needs to have as much information as possible. Not myths. Not legends. Not lies. Information."

"Whoever wants theater to "beautify" reality, the papers to "beautify" reality, literature to create "positive" heroes, and the nightly news to be "constructive" is raising loyal subjects, not citizens. The "ornamental" perception of life...has no place in an education system whose goal it is to raise citizens and autonomous adults. And if a teacher does not have the courage to look reality in the eye as it is, together with her pupils, and to think with her pupils, the education of pupils should not be placed in her hands. It is not them but herself that she shields from reality; it is she, in essence, who does not have the strength to cope with reality. And self-pity has little to do with education."

"At some point we will have to decide whether Hebrew in the next thirty or three hundred years will serve merely as a channel of immediate and basic communication, as a language at the top of a pyramid, without any pyramid beneath it, a claustrophobic language not much different from Esperanto, or whether it will embody an entire non-Western culture that we know is worth preserving. Since language shapes us more than we shape it, this decision will be essentially about our own identity. It seems more and more certain that this will be a matter of a conscious decision."

"We know more about a foreign politician or entertainer than we do about the man across the road."

"if the limits of my language are indeed the limits of my world, I cannot think of a world more open to exploration and discovery, more intriguing and satisfying, than Hebrew."

"there is nothing in the world as morally binding as belonging to a minority."

"Hebrew, a synchronic language, holds certain precise ethical and philosophical value concepts that belong only to Hebrew and to Judaism and that are really untranslatable."

"Generally, we translate only one level of a language, the top of the pyramid, leaving very different levels concealed below."

"It is probably true that the generation born in Palestine sixty years ago was the first since the Dispersion whose parents spoke Hebrew as an everyday language. Also, for the first time in two millennia, there was no longer a division between the mother tongue spoken at home and the male language of study and ritual. This is no minor matter, for from a psychological point of view, Hebrew at that point stopped being only a language of learning and ideas and became a language of feeling."

"Our history is not only the history of a people, but also the history of a language...Some parts of our tradition are widely known; others are less known because it is so difficult to translate from Hebrew. Whole theories were built upon incorrect translations from Hebrew. The commandment "Thou shalt not kill," as most translations have it, does not exist in the Bible. The original commandment is "Thou shalt not murder," which is entirely different. A whole ethos has been created in other cultures because of a fallacious translation of a commandment written originally in Hebrew."

"If people visit books as they do tourist sites, looking for the famous passages they have heard about, looking for the best-seller they were told about, just to be able to say "I was there," then we have missed the whole point of literature."

"Writing, real writing, has very little to do with so-called typical behavior. It must be whittled down from our familiar spheres of reference to what the person actually is and does; in good writing, no person is "typical.""

"To a certain extent, all writing is working within tradition: we use idioms, linguistic connections, and associations known to our tribe, because we cannot go outside language, and languages are tribal affairs."