Perets Hirshbeyn and Esther Shumiatsher, on a visit to Johannesburg, South Africa
Gallery of Esther Shumiatcher
Portrait of Peretz Hirschbein and Esther Shumiatcher
Gallery of Esther Shumiatcher
1922
Warsaw, Poland
Members of the young Yiddish literary crowd: sitting from right to left
Esther Shumiatcher (who later married Peretz Hirschbein), Khane Kacyzne, Peretz Hirschbein, Mendl Elkin, Esther (Esye) Elkin; standing from right to left Alter Kacyzne, poet Uri Zvi Greenberg.
Achievements
Portrait of Peretz Hirschbein and Esther Shumiatcher
Members of the young Yiddish literary crowd: sitting from right to left
Esther Shumiatcher (who later married Peretz Hirschbein), Khane Kacyzne, Peretz Hirschbein, Mendl Elkin, Esther (Esye) Elkin; standing from right to left Alter Kacyzne, poet Uri Zvi Greenberg.
Esther Shumiatcher-Hirschbein was a Yiddish poet and screenwriter, the wife of the well-known Yiddish writer Peretz Hirschbein.
Background
Shumiatcher was born on October 21, 1896 in Gomel (now in Belarus) to parents Judah and Chasia Shumiatcher. In 1911, her large family, with two parents and 11 children, moved to Calgary, Alberta when she was a child. In Gomel, the family were tenant farmers, while in Calgary Judah taught Hebrew in the winter and worked as a farm laborer in the summer. All family members contributed to the family income in the years following immigration, holding jobs and assisting their mother, who took in boarders. Shumiatcher grew up in Calgary where she went by the anglicized name Ethel Smith.
Education
She studied at high school in Calgary.
Career
After Shumiatcher’s high school graduation she worked in meat packing plants and as a waitress. In 1918, she met a leading playwright in New York’s Yiddish theater Peretz Hirshbein who had come on a tour to the community. The famous writer took ill with the flu while in the city and as he convalesced in the Smith/Shumiatcher home, Esther Shumiatcher and Hirshbein fell in love. The two married before the end of the year. Twenty years her senior and already an established writer, Hirschbein drew Shumiatcher into a milieu of writers and artists and into a life of travel. Encouraged by her husband, Shumiatcher, who had previously written but apparently not published poetry in English, now turned to Yiddish. Shortly after their marriage, Shumiatcher and Hirshbein moved to New York City. In 1920-1924, the couple set out on a worldwide adventure — traveling through Africa, Asia, the South Pacific, and Australia, before landing in Europe. On the this trip, Shumiatcher began her life’s work as a writer — writing plays at first and then poetry.
Shortly after her marriage, Shumiatcher published the first of two children’s plays intended for use in the Yiddish secular schools. There is no indication that they were ever performed for an audience, but they may have been used in the classroom. Both were written for child casts. “In Tol” (In the Valley 1920) is a half-mystical, half-real journey of a young girl, Esther, as she searches for her dead mother. A second play, Pasn likht (Streaks of Light 1925), followed Shumiatcher’s first long trip with Hirschbein. This play was directly inspired by traveling through the pogrom zones of Eastern Europe. Here, a group of orphaned children attempt to survive together after their village is devastated.
Already publishing her poetry in numerous literary journals, after Pasn likht Shumiatcher turned her full attention to her adult medium. She and Hirschbein traveled again to Eastern Europe in 1928-1929. On this visit, they spent 10 months over a cold winter in the Crimea visiting Jewish collective farms (one of several ultimately unsuccessful Soviet projects for resettling displaced Jews and reorienting them to rural labour). On this voyage they visited Shumiatcher’s home town of Gomel, Belarus and stayed in Warsaw for several months. They returned to America late in 1929, and Shumiatcher began gathering her poems for a first collection. The resulting book, “In shoen fun libshaft” (In the Hours of Love), was published in 1930 to mostly negative reviews.
Even Ravitch apparently abhorred it and claimed her poetry lacked teeth. Particularly irritating to many critics were the exotic locales evoked in the poetry: they complained that the writer appeared too detached from her subject matter. Her other poems, mostly very short (running from eight lines to a full page, but rarely longer), on a range of subjects both serious and playful, including love poems and nature lyrics, do not seem to have aroused much interest.
While Shumiatcher surely must have been disappointed with the reception of “In shoen fun libshaft”, she continued writ- Wandering is your fate 25 ing. In New York in 1934, she wrote her poem cycle “Nine Months” while pregnant. Her son Omus was born on 3 October 1934, and a cycle of birth poetry followed this event. “Nine Months” was published in January 1937 in the periodical Zamlbikher (Anthologies).
When Shumiatcher’s second book of poetry, “Ale tog” (Every Day), appeared in 1939 it included her birth poems. Ale tog received more critical attention. Several reviewers took pains to mention the improvement over her previous book and the innovation of “writing on a theme which until not long ago was almost completely missing from our literature.”
Shortly after publication of “Ale tog”, Hirschbein received an offer to write screenplays in Hollywood. Previously two of his plays had been made into movies (one silent and one in Yiddish) but he was now to turn to English-language screenplays for regular distribution. In 1940, Shumiatcher, Hirschbein, and Omus moved to Los Angeles. One screenplay, a wartime propaganda movie, was produced in 1943, but already Hirschbein’s health had begun to deteriorate with the first signs of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) that killed him in 1948. This era was obviously the most painful and disruptive of Shumiatcher’s life. Even though Hirschbein was so much older, she would have assumed that he would live past 68, and that at least they would be able to raise their son together. Hirschbein was her major literary influence, as well as her staunchest supporter, and her life was bound up with his not only emotionally but also creatively. The couple also faced a sudden loss of income. Productions of Hirschbein’s work and a joint touring and speaking schedule had provided most of the family’s income up to this point. With Hirschbein unable to work – and following his death – Shumiatcher had no source of income and no particular skills to put to work. She ultimately depended on her family for money.
After Hirschbein’s death Shumiatcher remained in Los Angeles to raise Omus, who eventually left to attend college in New York. In 1956, her final volume of poetry, “Lider” (Poems), was published by a committee of friends, stalwarts of the Los Angeles Yiddish community, who raised the funds for production. The poems in this book, which together form her most mature as well as her most personal writing, attest to her intense grief at losing her life’s companion, and the profound impact her marriage, sexuality, and subsequent widowhood had on her creative life.
After the publication of “Lider”, Shumiatcher appears to have written poetry very occasionally. She continued to lecture and travel widely, probably her only source of income. Appearances in New York, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Toronto were noted in the Yiddish press throughout the 1950s. In 1960, she went to Israel and stayed for over two years. In 1962, she returned to Los Angeles to an adoring community of Yiddishists.
Around this time, Shumiatcher relocated to New York to be closer to her son and his family. From that time until her death in 1985, she does not seem to have had a particularly active creative life, although occasional projects no doubt were fulfilling. She co-translated Hirschbein’s play “A Farvorfener vinkl”, probably for production. Two of her talented family members, brother-in-law Lazar Weiner and niece Minuetta Kessler, both working composers, set some of her poetry to music. She continued to be active in Yiddish literary circles, and today she is remembered by older members of New York’s secular Yiddish-speaking community.
Shumiatcher’s creative life seems to have been unusually closely tied to her adventurous and supportive partnership with Hirschbein. Unlike many English-language women writers before the current generation, for whom marriage spelled the end of creativity or who retreated from the world entirely in order to write, Shumiatcher’s marriage was the centrifugal force from which her poetry emanated. In contrast, her reception by male critics – there were virtually no Yiddish-language female critics until the 1950s, after much of Shumiatcher’s output had already been published – is all too familiar. She was sequestered into a separate category of “women writers,” compared only with other women writers, and given little critical analysis on her own terms – all of which suggest the patronizing and gendered ideology of cultural criticism. Shumiatcher took pains to make a case for herself and other women writers, arguing that women had separate stories to tell but neither separate nor lesser value in communal life.
Quotations:
We continue to be hounded by the institution that the Jewish tradition has apportioned to the Jewish woman – a footrest in Paradise. This has influenced the psychology of Jewish women and gave rise to a kind of spiritual dejection. There is no doubt that the Jewish woman has had, in all generations, potential in the realm of spiritual endeavor. Literature has passed over a number of important moments in the life of the Jewish woman, many life passages remain buried under a mound of ash. Overnight the rebirth of the Jewish woman took place, like a sudden storm through her life. She saw herself lost, spiritually naked before the great events of our time. It is time to put aside the traditional mekhitse [division between men and women in a synagogue]. I say this in opposition to those who in literature divide up writers into separate categories. It shows no respect to the literature to do that. There is no gender separation in art or in expression: womanliness – an expression you hear used so often – is completely flavorless. I am one of those women writers who wish to be writers, but I don’t deny that the woman depicts specific human experiences, which she conceives through her observations as a woman and a mother, that you cannot find among male writers. The entire physical otherness of women is such that even in the social and political spheres we react to events differently than men. In the example of the current Jewish tragedy, Yiddish women writers also reacted, but the voice was a different one."
Connections
In 1918, she met a leading playwright in New York’s Yiddish theater Peretz Hirshbein who had come on a tour to the community. The famous writer took ill with the flu while in the city and as he convalesced in the Smith/Shumiatcher home, Esther Shumiatcher and Hirshbein fell in love. The two married before the end of the year. He was 20 years senior. Their son Omus was born on 3 October 1934 in New York.