 Rajzel
Zychlinsky was born in Poland on July 27, 1910. Her first volume of poems,
Poems,
was published in 1936 in Warsaw, with an introduction by Itzik Manger.
The
Rain Sings, her second volume of poetry, appeared just weeks before
the occupation of Warsaw by Hitler's troops, and most copies were destroyed.
Soon thereafter she fled to Russian-occupied eastern Poland where she married
a young doctor, Isaac Kanter, whom she had met in Warsaw. Her husband found
work with the Russian army, and the couple moved further east to the city
of Kazan in Russia. Their families remained behind and perished in the
holocaust. Their son, Marek, was born in 1943.
After the war the couple and their son returned to Poland, and then moved to France. They emigrated to the United States in 1951. Rajzel settled in New York in 1952 and published several more volumes of poetry, including Silent Doors (1962), Autumn Squares (1969), and The November Sun (1977). In 1975 she was awarded the Itzik Manger prize
in Israel. In 1981 the book Bread fear the Birds, containing German translations
of a selection of her poems, appeared in Leipzig, East Germany. Eight more
of her poems have been translated by Aaron Kramer in his anthology, A
Century c f Yiddish Poetry. In 1993 she issued the book, New Poems,
in Tel Aviv, Israel. She presently lives in Brooklyn,
Marek Kanter
December 12, 1996 |
