Background
Kadia Molodowsky was born on May 10, 1894, in Byaroza, Brest region, Belarus, to a family steeped in tradition yet influenced by the Jewish Enlightenment. She immigrated to the United States in 1935.
1949
Kadia Molodowsky
1969
1395 Lexington Ave, New York, NY 10128, United States
Kadia Molodowsky Kadia Molodowsky at a reading at the 92nd Street Y on November 2, 1969.
1970
Kadia Molodowsky
Kadia Molodowsky
Kadia Molodowsky
1969
1395 Lexington Ave, New York, NY 10128, United States
Kadia Molodowsky Kadia Molodowsky at a reading at the 92nd Street Y on November 2, 1969.
1970
Kadia Molodowsky
Kadia Molodowsky
Kadia Molodowsky
(A House with Seven Windows is the famed Yiddish poet's on...)
A House with Seven Windows is the famed Yiddish poet's only collection of short stories. Written in simple prose, these stories are subtle portraits, tragic-comic, bittersweet, always generous-spirited, of ordinary people: Jews in pre-World War II Eastern Europe and Jews struggling to adjust to life in America.
https://www.amazon.com/House-Seven-Windows-Traditions-Literature/dp/0815608454
1957
Kadia Molodowsky was born on May 10, 1894, in Byaroza, Brest region, Belarus, to a family steeped in tradition yet influenced by the Jewish Enlightenment. She immigrated to the United States in 1935.
Tutored in secular subjects, Kadia Molodowsky passed gymnasium exams and earned a teaching certificate. She studied Hebrew pedagogy in Yeḥi'el Halperin’s Froebel Courses in Warsaw in 1913-1914 and then, during World War I, worked in homes for refugee children in Ukraine. In Odessa in 1916-1917, Molodowsky continued her studies with Halperin.
One of the early Yiddish poets, Kadia Molodowsky, began as a kindergarten teacher, writing children's stories and occasionally poetry for her students. When she was "discovered" by a group of Yiddish writers in Kyiv in 1920, she decided to take on poetry as a full-time avocation. Yiddish poetry was still new enough that she developed her own standards and set about revising her work to meet them.
In 1921, with her husband, Simkhe Lev, Kadia Molodowsky settled in Warsaw, where Molodowsky lived until 1935. In Warsaw, she taught Yiddish by day in the secular elementary schools of Central Yiddish Schools Organization and Hebrew by night at a Jewish community school. Active in the Yiddish Writers Union, she published extensively in the leading Warsaw literary journal, Literarishe bleter, in 1925-1935, and served as an editor in Fraynd in 1934-1936. In 1935 Molodowsky settled in New York. There she published children's poetry, two plays, two novels, a collection of short stories, journal and newspaper articles, and a serialized autobiography in Svive, the literary journal she also edited.
In Kheshvndike nekht, published in Vilna by Boris Kletskin, Kadia Molodowsky contrasts the female narrator's modernity with roles decreed for women by Jewish law and tradition. Her second book, Geyen shikhlekh avek: Mayselekh, she wrote for and about the impoverished Jewish children she taught. Another Molodowsky's books of poetry are In land fun mayn gebeyn, about exile, Der melekh Dovid aleyn iz geblibn, Holocaust poems, and Likht fun dornboym. This last book concluded with her 1950s poems on Israel, which, like the ending of her autobiography, expressed Molodowsky's Zionist vision of hope. Kadia Molodowskyy died in Philadelphia in 1975.
Kadia Molodowsky was one of the most prolific and public of the Yiddish writers, editors, and teachers in Warsaw and New York. She was a holder of the National Jewish Book Award for her work, Licht fun Dorenboin, in 1996, won a prize from the Warsaw Jewish Community and the Yiddish Pen Club for her book, Geyen shikhlekh avek: Mayselekh, and also received the Itzik Manger Prize for Yiddish letters in 1971.
(A House with Seven Windows is the famed Yiddish poet's on...)
1957From 1927 on, Kadia Molodowsky published essays on political and literary matters. In Literarishe bleter, she responded to a patronizing article by Melech Ravitch on women Yiddish poets and further articulated her views against lumping women poets together in a satirical essay. Molodowsky protested the pressure on Polish Yiddish writers to conform to political ideologies, and, in 1933, she defended Yiddish culture in Warsaw and attacked the proliferation of sensationalist trash literature. In 1934-1935, she joined an acrimonious debate between the Jewish Communists and Bundists by attacking Bund leaders for corruption in their dealings with the teachers' organization in the Central Yiddish Schools Organization schools.
Quotes from others about the person
Hillel Halkin: "One finds in Kadia Molodowsky's verse the sometimes whimsical and sometimes melancholy suggestion that she is just an ordinary woman whom life, or some power beyond life, has seduced into a career of poetry."
Kadia Molodowsky married Simcha Lev in 1921.
