Women Authors From Poland

"There is extraordinary vitality in Klepfisz's early poems on women in the Holocaust...In them, Klepfisz takes the considerable risk of trying to bear witness to this part of her history without compromise and without melodrama. She succeeds because she is a poet, not only a witness."

""Bashert" is a poem unlike any other I can think of in American, including Jewish-American, poetry, in its delineations not only of survivor experience (in the skin of the mother "passing" as gentile with her infant daughter) but of what happens after survival: the life that seems to go on, but cannot persevere; the life that does go on, struggling with a vast alienation, in a state of "equidistance from two continents," trying to fathom her place as a Jew in the larger American gentile world,"

"Klepfisz has written one of the great "borderland" poems-poems which emerge from the consciousness of being of no one geography, time zone or culture; of moving inwardly as well as outwardly between continents, land-masses, eras of history, or, as Chicana poet Gloria Anzaldúa expresses it, in "a constant state of mental nepantilism, an Aztec word meaning torn between ways." A consciousness which cannot be, and refuses to be, assimilated. A consciousness which tries to claim all its legacies: courage, endurance, vision, fierceness of human will, and also the underside of oppression, the distortions quarantine and violent deracination inflict on the heart. When I say that "Bashert" is a poem unlike any other I mean this through and through: in its form, in its verse and prose rhythms, in its insistence on memory without idealization, its refusal to let go."

"Klepfisz's bilingual poems do not-and this is significant-drop Yiddish phrases in a cosy evocation of an idealized past, embodied in bobe and zayde, or as a kind of Jewish seasoning on an American tongue."

"In white North America, poetry has been set apart from the practical arts, from political meaning, and also from "entertainment" and the accumulation of wealth-thus, pushed to the margins of life. Klepfisz, the inheritor of both a European Jewish Socialist-Bundist political tradition, and a Yiddish cultural tradition, naturally refuses such "enclosures.""

"Klepfisz is one of those rare North American artists who, within and by means of her art, explores the material conditions by which the creative impulse, which belongs to no gender, race, or class, can be realized or obstructed."

"In a different vein, Klepfisz's poems to women lovers probe with a questioning scrutiny what happens in bed, in relationship. Sometimes, as in "periods of stress" dry humor laces vulnerability; always there is compassion for both self and other."

"Throughout, and in its very last lines, this book asks fundamental questions about the uses of history. That it does so from a rootedness in Jewish history, an unassimilated location, is one part of its strength. But history alone doesn't confer this strength; the poet's continuing labor with Jewish meaning does. The other part, of course, is the integrity of its poetics. A Klepfisz poem lives amid complex tensions, even when its texture may appear transparent. There is a voice, sometimes voices, in these poems which can often best be heard by reading aloud. Her sense of phrase, of line, of the shift of tone, is almost flawless. But perfection is not what Irena Klepfisz is after. It is the tension among so many forces: language, speechlessness, memory, politics, irony, compassion, hunger for what is lost, hunger for a justice still to be made, that makes this poetry crucial to the new unfoldings of history that we begin, in 1990, to imagine."

"The extraordinary power of Irena Klepfisz's work lies in the force of its moral and artistic integrity. These essays interweave and overlap (not only with each other, but also with her poetry) in entirely unexpected ways. Who else but Klepfisz could make us understand so clearly (and always in a framework that is Jewish, lesbian, feminist, and conscious of class) the imperative to speak out against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza? Against anti-Semitism and homophobia? Against compulsory motherhood? Against the commercialization of the Holocaust? And to speak as loudly for the strengthening and preservation of secular Yiddish culture in the United States? For the demystification of writing? For the celebration and joy of creative work? At a time of repression, when progressive politics are eroding and hate crimes are on the rise, Klepfisz's essays make plain that the political is personal, and that the personal must continue to be understood as political. Klepfisz's sharp critiques of many movements and communities lead us to take action, which is her way of keeping hope alive. Although I have gladly accepted the task of writing the introduction to this volume of essays, it was through her poetry that I first came to know Irena Klepfisz. I can still call up the rush of excited recognition that came over me when, after browsing through the lesbian poetry section of a women's bookstore sometime in 1977, I casually opened periods of stress and recognized myself. Here was a woman writing as a child survivor of the Holocaust, as a lesbian, as a feminist, and as a Jew. At the time I knew of no other lesbian/feminist who had also somehow managed "to escape that fate.""

"Experiments, she calls her essays. Attempts at solutions. But Klepfisz has never used the lack of certainty as an excuse to avoid taking action. In addition to her theoretical writings, she has been an organizer in both Jewish and lesbian/feminist communities, lecturing and giving workshops on feminism, Yiddish culture, anti-Semitism, and the Middle East. Taking my cue from the author's preface, I have allowed myself to respond to these essays in a nonlinear associative way, which is also my preferred mode of writing. Klepfisz's essays are freeing and engaging because of the honesty she brings to the processes of writing, thinking and rethinking, questioning, reexamining a decision that may seem to be correct today but may prove to be disastrously wrong tomorrow."

"Klepfisz is emphatic that "non-observance the choice made by the majority of American Jews is not the same as secularism, that consciously chosen pre-Holocaust secularism was always political and cultural, and always associated with a "fierce determination to preserve Jewish identity." She is equally emphatic that "a true commitment to Jewish secularism inevitably means that we must make decisions-just like observant Jews-about how to structure our lives and our relations with Jews and non-Jews-how to incorporate the past.... A true commitment to Jewish secularism inevitably also means a commitment to establishing and supporting secular Jewish institutions that provide us with a sense of community and common purpose.""

"Klepfisz insists on maintaining the integrity of each individual culture as it joins others. This is a vision worth emulating."

"In a 1989 speech at a public event sponsored by the Jewish Women's Committee to End the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Klepfisz articulated what motivates her to action-to organize workshops, co-found the Committee, and travel to Israel to connect with the women's peace movement there: "We are told that history is made by other people.... We are told this because we are women.... Over and over again the message is monotonously the same: you have no power, you have no power to change anything. But I don't believe this. I believe common, ordinary people are not passive participants in historical events. How each of us shapes our life, shapes history."

"One of the most striking characteristics of so many of Klepfisz's essays is her ability to develop a bilingual mode of writing, a mode that transplants Yiddish into English, thus preserving mame-loshn (the European mothers' tongue), making the language more immediate, less strange. The deep resonances and childhood memories that surfaced when I first read these essays remind me that for Klepfisz, as for me and many other Ashkenazi Jews dispersed throughout the world, Yiddish serves a vital function-it is "the mirror that made me visible to myself." Klepfisz knows that language is a significant carrier of culture, something that is especially true of Yiddish, which in the context of Jewish history "summons a world beneath the words.""

"jeśli zechcesz odejść ode mnie... nie zapominaj o uśmiechu możesz zapomnieć kapelusza rękawiczek notesu z ważnymi adresami czegokolwiek wreszczie -- po co musiałbyś wrócić wracając niespodzianie zobaczysz mnie w łzach i nie odejdziesz jeśli zechcesz pozostać nie zapominaj o uśmiechu wolno ci nie pamiętać daty moich urodzin ani miejsca naszego pierwszego pocałunku ani powodu naszej pierwszej sprzeczki jeśli jednak chcesz zostać nie czyń tego z westchnieniem ale z uśmiechem zostań"

"In "The Fat of the Land," Anzia Yezierska describes an unfortunate woman whose children had prospered and insisted that she move away from Delancey Street to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. But her Americanized children are strange to her, and she feels isolated amidst her new luxury and misses, above all, her old neighbors. "Uptown here," she tells a friend who comes to visit, "nobody cares if the person next door is dying or going crazy from loneliness. It ain't anything like we used to have in Delancey Street, when we could walk into one another's rooms without knocking, and borrow a pinch of salt or a pot to cook in."17 In friendship, there was comfort, and without it, women felt bereft."

"One young woman in Anzia Yezierska's short story, "Hunger," recalled, as her eyes grew misty, "How I suffered in Savel. I never had enough to eat. I never had shoes on my feet. I had to go barefoot even in the freezing winter. But still I love it. I was born there. I love the houses and the straw roofs, the mud streets, the cows, the chickens and the goats. My heart always hurts me for what is no more.'"

"Daughters like Anzia Yezierska, who left home at seventeen seeking above all to become a "person," had longings alien to their parents, whose main concern was basic survival."

"This tension between the desire to Americanize and the psychological hold of parents and their traditions has been best described in the novels of Anzia Yezierska. In six books published between 1920 and 1932, Yezierska wrote of the squalor of ghetto life and the constant struggle against dirt, poverty, and old-world family restrictions. Her works portray the longing of a young woman for freedom and beauty, personified by the non-Jewish world, and each one ends with the realization that the source of life lies in the world that was rejected. "All these years," she wrote in All I Could Never Be, "I have gone about a little bit ashamed of my manners, my background. I was so eager to acquire from the Gentiles their low voices, their calm, their poise, that I lost what I had-what I was.' The young woman in Children of Loneliness observes, "I can't live with the old world, and I'm yet too green for the new. Yezierska was not so much writing novels as she was autobiography, so her plots appear and reappear in scarcely changed form. She could tell no other story than her own, but she recorded that with a searing passion. The plot of Bread Givers, her most popular novel, she explained to producer Sam Goldwyn, "is the expiation of guilt. . . . I had to break away from my mother's cursing and my father's preaching to live my life: but without them I had no life. When you deny your parents, you deny the ground under your feet, the sky over your head. You become an outlaw, a pariah...And now, here I am-lost in chaos, wandering between worlds.""

"Immigrant writers of the early twentieth century were still addressing the artistic problem of how to bring Jewish experience to the American reader. Anzia Yezierska, a much more combative writer than Mary Antin, could never get beyond the story of how she left her immigrant home. Whereas Antin "made herself over" into a genteel writer and Cahan accommodated the English reader by treating Yiddish as a foreign language, Yezierska brought the immigrant streets to life by imitating their cacophony and fractured English. "My voice was like dynamite," boasts the ten-year-old herring salesman of Bread Givers. "Louder than all the pushcart peddlers, louder than all the hollering noises of bargaining and selling." Yezierska's resistance to genteel authority and to the humiliations of poverty bursts through the prose and hauls readers down to her level of cultural subsistence. But once her autobiographical heroines move out of their neighborhoods and into their new tailored suits, the author loses the Yiddish pungency that was her trademark."

"Immigrant life in general is miserable, as one sees in the literature produced by those who experienced the journey. In the Jewish novels of Abraham Cahan, Henry Roth, and Anzia Yezierska, the picture is frequently a grim one."

"The multitude of Jewish options that existed before World War II are ones which most nonobservant U.S. Ashkenazi Jews are hardly familiar with, much less recognize...Before World War II many Yiddish-speaking European Jews were already rejecting observance and secularism. Eager to assimilate, they deliberately abandoned their Jewish language and culture. The well-known letters (Bintl Brif) of Der forverts (The Jewish Daily Forward), the thirties English stories of Anzia Yezierska, and the more modern forties and fifties Yiddish stories of Kadia Malodowsky describe this assimilation minutely."

"Anzia Yezierska, who told, in Yiddish-like english, stories of Jewish immigrants, especially women's struggles for love, freedom, and education. Of her work, she wrote: "It's not me-it's their cries-my own people-crying in me! Hannah Breineh, Shmendrek, they will not be stilled in me, till all America stops to listen.""

"“My one story is hunger.” So declared the protagonist of Anzia Yezierska’s Children of Loneliness (1923). Having immigrated with her family from Eastern Europe, Yezierska chronicled the hunger of her generation of newly arrived Jewish Americans around the turn of the century. Her novels, short stories, and autobiographical writing vividly depict both the literal hunger of poverty and the metaphoric hunger for security, education, companionship, home, and meaning—in short, for the American dream."

"She was a misfit all her life. Throughout the years she saw herself standing on the street with her nose pressed against the bakery window: hungry and shut out. No matter what happened, she felt marginal. Not belonging became her identity, and then her subject. After she began to write, it was her necessity. In Red Ribbon on a White Horse the relief she feels at finding herself poor again in the Thirties is palpable. She had this in common with other talented neurotics-Jack Kerouac, George Gissing, Jean Rhys-who also managed to keep themselves poverty-stricken and socially outcast, for very much the same reason...She is one of the great refuse-niks of the world. She refuses to accept life's meanness and littleness. She refuses to accommodate herself to loneliness of the spirit. She refuses to curb emotional ambition. She's an immigrant? She's a woman? Her hunger is voracious? intrusive? exhausting? Still she refuses. And on a big scale. We cannot turn away from her. Obsessing as grandly as the Ancient Mariner, her words continue, even now seventy years after they were written, to grab us by the collar. They shake and demand, compel, and remind. Attention must be paid. "I want to make from myself a person!" The performance is astonishing."

"For Mary Antin and another immigrant Jewish author, Anzia Yezierska, the sacrifices were costly but appeared warranted, the passports to professional success and American identities. Part of a generation bridging Yiddish culture and Yankee experience, Antin and Yezierska passionately described the struggles and changes within the immigrant Jewish family. More than half a century ago, the autobiographical Promised Land and the novel, Bread Givers, anticipated the concerns of such later authors as Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, Norma Rosen and Joanne Greenberg."

"Reading Miss Yezierska's book sets me thinking again about that famous and curious statement in the Preamble to the Constitution about the self-evident right of all men to "the pursuit of happiness," for I have read few accounts of such a pursuit as truthful and moving as hers."

"The trouble with us is that the ghetto of the Middle Ages and the children of the twentieth century have to live under one roof."

"A man is free to go up as high as he can reach up to; but I, with all my style and pep, can't get a man my equal because a girl is always judged by her mother."

"The world is a wheel always turning."

"In an air-shaft so narrow that you could touch the next wall with your bare hands, Hanneh Breineh leaned out and knocked on her neighbor's window. (first lines)"

"Shenah Pessah paused in the midst of scrubbing the stairs of the tenement. "Ach!" she sighed. "How can his face still burn so in me when he is so long gone? How the deadness in me flames up with life at the thought of him!" (beginning of "Hunger")"

"Without comprehension, the immigrant would forever remain shut - a stranger in America. Until America can release the heart as well as train the hand of the immigrant, he would forever remain driven back upon himself, corroded by the very richness of the unused gifts within his soul. ("How I found America")"

"Every breath I drew was a breath of fear, every shadow a stifling shock, every footfall struck on my heart like the heavy boot of the Cossack. (beginning of "How I Found America")"

"With the suitcase containing all her worldly possessions under her arm, Sophie Sapinsky elbowed her way through the noisy ghetto crowds. Pushcart peddlers and pullers-in shouted and gesticulated. Women with market-baskets pushed and shoved one another, eyes straining with the one thought-how to get the food a penny cheaper. With the same strained intentness, Sophie scanned each tenement, searching for a room cheap enough for her dwindling means. (beginning of "My Own People")"

"Like all people who have nothing, I lived on dreams. (beginning of "The Miracle")"

""...When I only begin to read, I forget I'm on this world. It lifts me on wings with high thoughts." ("Wings")"

"My heart chokes in me like in a prison! I'm dying for a little love and I got nobody-nobody!" wailed Shenah Pessah, as she looked out of the dismal basement window. (beginning of "Wings")"

"I feel like a starved man who is so bewildered by the first sight of food that he wants to grab and devour the ice-cream, the roast, and the entrée all in one gulp. For ages and ages, my people in Russia had no more voice than the broomstick in the corner. The poor had no more chance to say what they thought or felt than the dirt under their feet. And here, in America, a miracle has happened to them. They can lift up their heads like real people. After centries of suppression, they are allowed to speak. Is it a wonder that I am too excited to know where to begin? All the starved, unlived years crowd into my throat and choke me. I don't know whether it is joy or sorrow that hurts me so. I only feel that my release is wrung with the pain of all those back of me who lived and died, their dumbness pressing down on them like stones on the heart. (beginning of "Mostly About Myself")"

"One glance at his wife's tight-drawn mouth warned Reb Ravinsky of the torrent of wrath about to burst over his head. "Nu, my bread-giver? Did you bring me the rent?" she hurled at him between clenched teeth. (beginning of "The Lord Giveth")"

"Spring was in the air. But such radiant, joyous spring as one coming out of the dark shadows of the Ghetto never could dream. Earth and sky seemed to sing with the joy of an unceasing holiday. Rebecca Yudelson felt as if she had suddenly stepped into fairyland where the shadow of sorrow or sickness, where the black blight of poverty had never been. (beginning of "Dreams and Dollars")"

"Ever since I began to read the American magazines one burning question has consumed me: Why is it that only the thoughts of educated people are written up? Why shouldn't sometimes a servant girl or a janitress or a coal-heaver give his thoughts to the world? We who are forced to do the drudgery of the world, and who are considered ignorant because we have no time for school, could say a lot of new and different things, if only we had a chance to get a hearing. Very rarely I'd come across a story about a shop-girl or a washerwoman. But they weren't real stories. They were twisted pictures of the way the higher-ups see us people. They weren't as we are. They were as unreal as the knowledge of the rich about the poor. Often I'd read those smooth-flowing stories about nothing at all, and I'd ask myself, Why is it that so many of the educated, with nothing to say, know how to say that nothing with such an easy flow of words, while I, with something so aching to be said, can say nothing? I was like a prison world full of choked-in voices, all beating in my brain to be heard. The minute I'd listen to one voice a million other voices would rush in crying for a hearing, till I'd get too excited and mixed up to know what or where."

"The Americans of tomorrow, the America that is every day nearer coming to be, will be too wise, too open-hearted, too friendly-handed, to let the least last-comer at their gates knock in vain with his gifts unwanted. ("America and I")"

"As one of the dumb, voiceless ones I speak. One of the millions of immigrants beating, beating out their hearts at your gates for a breath of"

"Art should be free, like sunlight and beauty. The only compensation for the artist is the chance to feed hungry hearts. ("Brothers")"

"The stars in their infinite peace seemed to pour their healing light into me. I thought of captives in prison, the sick and the suffering from the beginning of time who had looked to these stars for strength. What was my little sorrow to the centuries of pain which those stars had watched? So near they seemed, so compassionate. My bitter hurt seemed to grow small and drop away. If I must go on alone, I should still have silence and the high stars to walk with me. (p220)"

"I had just begun to peel the potatoes for dinner | when my oldest sister Bessie came in, her eyes far away and very tired. She dropped on the bench by the sink and turned her head to the wall. One look at her, and I knew she had not yet found work. I went on peeling the potatoes, but I no more knew what my hands were doing. I felt only the dark hurt of her weary eyes. I was about ten years old then. But from always it was heavy on my heart the worries for the house as if I was mother. I knew that the landlord came that morning hollering for the rent. And the whole family were hanging on Bessie’s neck for her wages. Unless she got work soon, we’d be thrown in the street to shame and to laughter for the whole world. (first lines)"

"A warm wave of happiness welled up in me. Often before I had tried to be happy, but this happiness now came unbidden, unwilled, as though all the hells I had been through had opened a secret door. Why had I no premonition in the wandering years when I was hungering and thirsting for recognition, that this quiet joy, this sanctuary, was waiting for me after I had sunk back to anonymity? I did not have to go to far places, sweat for glory, strain for the smile from important people. All that I could ever be, the glimpses of truth I reached for everywhere, was in myself. The power that makes grass grow, fruit ripen, and guides the bird in its flight is in us all. At any moment when man becomes aware of that inner power, he can rise above the accidents of fortune that rule his outward life, creating and recreating himself out of his defeats. Yesterday I was a bungler, an idiot, a blind destroyer of myself, reaching for I knew not what and only pushing it from me in my ignorance. Today the knowledge of a thousand failures cannot keep me from this light born of my darkness, here, now."

"For a long time I sat still, staring at the passing scenery through which the train was speeding, pondering the loneliness in each individual soul. The struggle of man, alone with the feeble resources of courage at his command, against a universe that cares nothing for his hopes and fears."

"on the train as I faced my disgrace, I saw that Hollywood was not my success, nor my present poverty and anonymity, failure. I saw that "success," "failure," "poverty," "riches," were price tags, money values of the market place which had mesmerized and sidetracked me for years."