Women Authors From The United States

"Poetry is an overlooked and underrated kind of art."

"people use words, words that aren’t really mine, that are from our language, from our history. It is not even really me, you know — it is everything that people over the generations and over the centuries have deemed beautiful. And beautiful has a different connotation than aesthetics."

"purple is of the spirit and denotes a change from one world or life position to another. In recent times, the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 marked the greatest single change in the American economic and political viewpoint since the time of the Great Depression, the New Deal, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt fifty years earlier. And the fashion industry responded in kind, reflecting 1981 as a year of change by coming out with racks of clothes for men and women that featured every shade and hue of purple."

"There are a lot of stories like that, about how words have power that can create and heal. Also destroy. After something is said, the people who heard it will always remember it. You have to think about the words you say."

"What I have found in life-it makes me very sad-is that one friend sustains me in one direction, another in another direction. What's missing are the friends who sustain one altogether."

"In the forties Diana Trilling could write words that in their sharp moral focus may remind us of some Victorian prophet: "Ours being in all spheres such a 'know-how' culture, a civilization so brilliantly skilled in turning out anything it sets its hand to and yet so appallingly ignorant of what is worth making or to what use the things it makes should be put, we cannot be surprised that our literature, too, shows a marked ascendancy of craft over conscience. Probably there has never been a time when so many people wrote so 'well' as now but to such meager purpose; when, indeed, the emptier a novel's content, the surer its technical proficiency." If the reader thinks that sounds more like a critic than a book reviewer, he is right. And as a critic, Diana Trilling has range; she is not satisfied to leave literature sitting there uninterpreted in its fullest psychological, social, and political meaning, for she perceives that "literature is no mere decoration of life but an index of the health or sickness of society." It follows that "just as dictatorship, war, and all the other hideous phenomena of our political day undoubtedly answer a profound need in the modern mass-personality, so the debasement of our literary standards reflects a loss of standard throughout our lives.""

"Love idealizes, or at least traditionally that has been one of the differential diagnoses: love idealizes, adds, but sex is just body meeting body, sometimes with love, sometimes with affection, sometimes with neither, just for the fun or satisfaction of it."

"In a speech last year on women's liberation, I said how wonderful it was for us to be living in a period in which Dostoevski's statement that there was no such thing as an ugly woman was at last coming true. Of course I don't mean that absolutely and literally but I said it seriously in that speech because I was talking about the terrible Madison Avenue-contrived notions of sexual attractiveness that were imposed upon the girls of my generation and how dreadful it was to be made to think, as I did, that you had to conform to some impossible standard of advertising beauty in order to be in the sexual running at all. How can anyone of my generation do anything except celebrate the fact that this is no longer how things are?"

"As a child at a mission boarding school in the 1960s, I was forced to learn English. Nowhere in our lessons was there any mention of Native history. But at night, after lights out, we girls gathered in the dark to tell stories and sing Navajo songs, quietly, so as to not wake the housemother. We were taught that if we broke the rules, we would go to hell, a place we could not conceive of—there is no Navajo analogy. As I learned to read, I discovered in books a way to assuage my longing for my parents, my siblings, my home. So in this way my schooling was a mixed experience, a fact that was true for many Native children."

"To be sure, the part played by television in disturbing the normal rate of national and even international development and in robbing us of the physical distance which formerly separated us from events and therefore forced us to exercise our own minds and imaginations in order to get even a first grasp on history-in-the-making, is not to be underestimated as a factor in our recent dislocation in space and time. The death of John Kennedy, however, made for a subtler and perhaps a more pervasive disturbance in our historical balance. It altered our sense of ourselves as a people; it deprived us of the promise of a future. What could more profoundly affect the motions of time?"

"we may protest that women's small contribution to culture doesn't indicate a lack of capacity but merely reflects the way men have contrived things to be: we can blame women's small place in culture on culture. But this leaves unanswered the question of why it is that over so many hundreds of years women have consented to follow the male dictate and allowed men to fashion the culture according to male design. It also leaves unanswered the even more fundamental question of why it is that in every society which has ever been studied-so Margaret Mead tells us-whatever is the occupation of men has the greater prestige"

"In Navajo, they say the sacred begins at the tip of my tongue. So there’s very much sacredness or a holiness that’s associated with creativity. Whatever a person creates and brings into this world is sacred. And it adds to the beauty of the world. We all benefit when people create something new."

"as Freud's views on the childhood source of mental disorder have permeated our culture, there has been mounted a wide campaign of mother-suspicion and mother-discreditation. From Sidney Howard's play The Silver Cord, in the mid-twenties, to Philip Roth's more recent Portnoy's Complaint, our literature has disseminated the idea that American women alternate a diet of husbands with a diet of sons."

"I traveled in a world that once was—Hollywood of the war and immediate postwar years. And I existed in a world that never is—the prison of the mind. If what I have learned from these experiences can be summed up in one sentence, it would be this: life is not a movie. But I do not make that point in a sad or regretful way. I can only wonder, if my life had been a movie, would a director have cast Gene Tierney to play the part? The bitter with the sweet makes for a better part."

"I learned that carrying on while you're broken is not the answer. I tried to work harder and harder, thinking that work would cure everything. All it did was make things worse."

"As long as I was playing someone else, I was fine. When I had to be myself, my problems began."

"In Navajo, the idea of words or language is really our origin. We were created by words, and we survived by words. Everything that comprises a Navajo person is based on words — your clan, where you come from, how the world was created."

"It seemed to me, ruled my writing, whatever its subject: my belief that even in an unsatisfactory society the individual is best defined by his social geography."

"The notion of punishing a child had apparently never occurred to these people, nor did their behavior show anything that could truly be called permissiveness. No child would have dreamed of inconveniencing, interrupting, or being waited on by an adult. And by the age of four, children were contributing more to the work force in their family than they were costing others."

"One thinks, “Well, these are savages. They wear red paint and feather loin cloths, so they’re not people.” But they’re exactly the same species as we are, except they are behaving the way we all evolved to behave. We, on the other hand, are mistreated as infants and children, treated inappropriately for our species. As a result, we keep re-creating an anti-social population. Nobody’s born rotten. You just don’t have bad kids. It’s not true. There is no such thing. But we can make them bad. Ironically, the reason it’s possible to make these profoundly social animals bad or anti-social is because we are so social."

"Our parents, our tribesman, our authority figures, clearly expect us to be bad or anti-social or greedy or selfish or dirty or destructive or self-destructive. Our social nature is such that we tend to meet the expectations of our elders. Whenever this reversal took place and our elders stopped expecting us to be social and expected us to be anti-social, just to put it in gross terms, that’s when the real fall took place. And we’re paying for it dearly. Just imagine the neurotic and psychopathic people that we have become. Why do we have a 50% divorce rate? Why do we have so many police? It’s not just Americans, it’s the whole of Western civilization laboring under a misapprehension of what human nature truly is. That’s what I learned from my experiences."

"In the two and a half years during which I lived among Stone Age Indians in the South American jungle (not all at once, but on five separate expeditions with a lot of time between them for reflection), I came to see that our human nature is not what we have been brought up to believe it is. Babies of the Yequana tribe, far from needing peace and quiet to go to sleep, snoozed blissfully whenever they were tired, while the men, women, or children carrying them danced, ran, walked, shouted, or paddled canoes. Toddlers played together without fighting or arguing, and they obeyed their elders instantly and willingly."

"The anthropologist without portfolio was Jean Liedloff, and she couldn’t help puzzling over what could be setting these kids so strikingly apart from any Western children in her experience. The mothering practices of the Yequana women suddenly came into focus. Liedloff observed that the Yequana, unlike most Western mothers, were in constant physical contact with their babies until the babies started moving around on their own. By day mothers carried their babies in slings. This way the baby had access to the breast and could nurse at will. By night each family shared a single sleeping place, allowing the baby’s attachment to the mother to proceed uninterrupted. Liedloff also noticed that the babies were not the center of their mothers’ attention."

"Wealth, beauty, and fame are transient. When those are gone, little is left except the need still to be useful, even though the parts get fewer."

"The word "actress" has always seemed less a job description to me than a title."

"Jealousy is, I think, the worst of all faults because it makes a victim of both parties."

"Margolin's fierce, individualistic expressiveness was not at all concerned with the literary niceties. In a letter to the critic S. Tenenboym, she declared: “My poems are not just mumblings, aromas, spiderwebs. A large part of them are texture-massive, rhythmic, broad; and the context-dramatic.""

"The Yiddish poet Reuven Ayzland kept her informed about how her poems were being received in the New York cafes where the Yiddish literary intelligentsia gathered. About the reception of her poem "To Be a Beggarwoman," which had just appeared in the weekly newspaper, Di Fraye Arbeter Shtime (The Liberated Workers' Voice), he wrote: "Last night, Anna Margolin was the main topic among the literati. A thousand hypotheses were offered about who might be hiding behind the name, and the general opinion is that it must certainly be a man." Later, he wrote her again: "Why people want Anna Margolin to be a man is beyond me. The general opinion, however, is that these poems are written by an experienced hand. And a woman can't write like that." These clearly prejudiced responses indicate how widespread such attitudes were at that time and perhaps cast some light on the reception her book was to receive."

"Although Anna Margolin was neglected by male critics of her time, who dismissed her as a "woman writer," and her reputation suffered during the general decline of interest in Yiddish writing, now after more than half a century of obscurity, her work has been rediscovered. A new generation of feminist scholars-Adrienne Cooper, Marcia Falk, Kathryn Hellerstein, Norma Fein Pratt, Sheva Zucker, and others are reappraising Margolin's achievement. Her poetry, reissued in a Yiddish edition, speaks to us across the generations with perhaps even greater strength today than it had in her lifetime. Anna Margolin dreamed of immortality. In the last of her three poems titled "Autumn," she wrote: “Heavy autumn, heavy step, I am old./Dark heart of mine, don't curse, believe in miracles:/somewhere in the world, in a city/I am flowering like a lily.”"

"Enamored of the work of the poet Federico Garcia Lorca, she undertook to learn Spanish. She was greatly influenced by Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud; among the Germans, by Else Lasker-Schüler and Rainer Maria Rilke; and among the Yiddish poets, by Itsik Manger and Avrom Sutzkever. She was knowledgeable about the major literary trends in poetry and was a formidable critic. When Margolin's collection Lider (Poems) was published in 1929, leading writers in Warsaw discussed her work with great admiration, and gatherings were held to read and study her poetry. Although Lider was well-received in New York, it did not gain the wide readership Margolin had hoped for-even though such well-known writers as Chaim Nachman Bialik and Moishe Nadir praised her work."

"Margolin's major themes of anxiety, loneliness, and a search for meaning run through all the sections of her book...Anna Margolin's central motifs include her yearning for transcendence, her resistance to the constraints of gender, and the tensions between rigid immobility and graceful movement-between proud, calm exteriors and inner turmoil, between mirror images that mock her and the masks and shawls that conceal her."

"The Yiddish newspapers provided only limited opportunities for female writers. These women did not write about economics or politics, but were invariably consigned to the other side of the mekhitse (the barrier separating men from women in the synagogue)-to the women's pages, where they were limited to writing about fashion, home decor, and child rearing. Many of them, including Anna Margolin, resented this restriction. In addition to a weekly column, Margolin wrote fiction and essays...With her flair and style, she succeeded in leaving the mark of her considerable writing ability and literary consciousness on even trivial subjects. Her articles soon came to the attention of the major Yiddish and Hebrew writers, such as Chaim Nachman Bialik, Mani Leyb, and Itsik Manger. But many critics refused to believe that these articles were written by a woman. Reuven Ayzland said of her fashion section in Der Tog (The Day) that "it read like poetry.""

"During the early decades of the twentieth century, Yiddish women writers in North America considered themselves emancipated and enlightened. They created an extensive literature that ran the gamut from chronicles of the domestic scene to the experimental and highly complex writing of Anna Margolin and others."

"Anna Margolin created her own language and style, which even now seems fresh and contemporary."

"While most of the Yiddish poets of the 1920s were conventional in their use of rhyme and observed the linguistic proprieties of that time, Anna Margolin-along with other Yiddish women writers-experimented with free verse and with incongruous and jarring juxtapositions of diction and sound. Although no specific connections have been established between Anna Margolin and other Yiddish women writers, she acknowledged their general influence in a letter to Reuven Ayzland: “If I have borrowed from anyone, it was not from men, never, only from women. And if my own work shows signs of other minds, other hearts-these are the minds and hearts of women I have encountered. I never forget them.”"

"Anna Margolin was an exceptionally beautiful and gifted woman, fiercely individualistic and with a volatile temperament, who lived a tempestuous, unconventional life. Like many other Jewish women writers-Clare Goll (Franco-German poet, 1901-1977), Elsa Lasker Schüler (German poet, 1869-1945), and Yente Serdatsky (Yiddish writer, 1877-1962)-she adopted a bohemian and an eccentric lifestyle. A complex personality torn by fundamental tensions, Margolin had a keen wit, intellectual acumen, and uncompromising honesty; she was also high-strung and aggressively self-confident. She threw herself into both intellectual pursuits and romantic attachments with great passion and had a succession of lovers beyond her two marriages. Most of her liaisons were with exceptional and prominent men."

"As a translator of Yiddish, I often find myself confronting the void created by the loss of millions of Yiddish-speaking Jews. It was therefore with a sense of urgency as well as obligation that I undertook to make the treasure of Anna Margolin's poetry available in English. I came to the poetry of Anna Margolin as a member of the Yiddish Women Writers' Study Group in Toronto. We began by reading poetry in Yiddish, and Anna Margolin's poems made an immediate powerful impression on me: her images possessed me like a dybbuk. Margolin haunted me for the better part of five years as I tried to understand her work. As I wrote draft translations, I often felt that she was speaking through me and sometimes even for me. During this process, when the meaning of a particularly troubling phrase or image suddenly revealed itself to me, I would experience a sense of "joyous rapture." Rilke used this term to describe the heightened state he found himself in when translating the poetry of Paul Valéry."

"There are other ways as well from a linguistic or literary aspect, where you could see how Jewish tradition was being reinvented with a kind of radical lens. For example, Anna Margolin, a Yiddish modernist writer, described herself in a letter where she says, “I've always been an anarchist. I've never been able to be an atheist. Indeed, in times of trouble, I spoke to God and I gave God hell.” And that's one way of modeling the psychological straddling of having grown up with a religious background and then reinventing it in some way towards anarchism."

"A fiery bohemian, who wrote a passionate, disciplined poetry."

"What is rarely known except by scholars is the range and variety of the pre-Holocaust Ashkenazi communities of Europe: traditional, socialist, communist; Orthodox and secular; capitalist and worker; Yiddish-speaking and/or fluent in the vernacular of wherever they lived: Russian, Polish, French, Czech, German. ... There is a whole literature, not just Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer, or Sholem Aleykhem...but also brilliant narrative writers and experimental poets such as Chaim Grade, Kadia Molodowsky, Anna Margolin, Mani Leyb, Itsik Manger, and a host of others."

"Why must one rhyme?... My work demands otherwise. I require bad rhymes because I don't want good ones... I know shvayg rhymes with tsvayg and shtayg; lebn with shvebn and shtrebn; himl with driml... but I require something different. I am insulted by the mechanical precision of the conventional rhyme. Somewhere, perhaps in only one syllable, the words should agree. I want the third and fourth lines to be subtly evocative of the first line with the colour of a word, with a sound that is but a shadow, a pale echo of the previously used sound."

"The authentic artist carries within himself another world to which the ordinary person has no access. The great value of the poet is that he enriches us with new, thoroughly experienced feelings, with unseen or differently seen landscapes."

"A human being emerges out of her poetry who lives life intensely and sharply. Nothing is lukewarm to her. Everything becomes an elemental, shocking experience drawn from the broadest range of emotions: from the most refined love to the most barbarous hatred, from the deepest servility to proud admiration and contempt, from turbulent dramaticism to calm resignation, from heroic daring to almost childlike fear."

"Anna Margolin's reputation rests on one slim volume of Yiddish poetry published in New York City in 1929. Her poetry remains remarkably fresh and contemporary in spite of having been written a long time ago: the language is original and personal, and her themes of anxiety, loneliness, and search for identity and meaning are, if anything, more relevant today than they were in her lifetime."

"Even though Anna Margolin was far from typical, her life and her writing tell us something about the restlessness and dislocation that marked her and many other Jewish women of her time...Margolin wrote around what Tillie Olsen calls "hidden silences" or "one book silences," publishing journalism for years, then editing a volume of the poetry of others (Dos yidishe lid in amerike (The Yiddish Poem in America), 1923). Her own poetic voice emerged in the single volume Lider, published when she was 42, and even here the images tell of enforced silence, muffled cries, women mute as statues, "madness closing tenderly over [the] throat". Margolin actually felt the silence, writing desperately in letters of pressure in her throat, obstruction; imagining growths, tumors."

"Say this: until her death"

"I want, angry and tender one,"

"She of the cold marble breasts"

"The creative person wears a mask... just like a sculptor wears an apron.""

"I know that my devils have knives instead of teeth, and snakes instead of fingers. I can't do very much about that. I can't just get rid of them."