Life is a Sacred Text

Life is a Sacred Text

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Life is a Sacred Text
Life is a Sacred Text
"...as if lit by a begrudging wax candle."

"...as if lit by a begrudging wax candle."

Celia Dropkin's fierce gaze

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg's avatar
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg
Aug 31, 2023
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Life is a Sacred Text
Life is a Sacred Text
"...as if lit by a begrudging wax candle."
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Celia Dropkin was born in 1887 in Bobyrusk, in what’s now Belarus (then: part of the Russian Empire) to an assimilated Russian Jewish family. She went to Russian school, but when she went to Kiev to continue her learning she first fell in with Hebrew writers and poets, and then wound up marrying (back in Bobyruck) a Bundist (Jewish socialist). Who, because of his politics, eventually needed to high-tail it outta town and made his way to the US (ca. 1910); two years later Celia followed with their son. She became big in NY Yiddish cultural circles, translated a lot of her poetry from Russian to Yiddish until she began just writing straight into Yiddish, and was particularly noted for her frank discussion of desire, the erotic, and the like—far more progressive than anything else in her culture and time/place.

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