Category: Candles of Song

Yiddish poems about mothers, in memory of my mother, Miriam Pearlman Zucker, 1914-2012.

Asya Kuritsky-Guy (1932-2009) was born in Vilna. Her father was a painter who wrote plays that were never produced. During the Second World War she and her parents fled to Soviet Russia. At the age of eight she began writing poetry in both Russian and Yiddish. When she was repatriated to Poland after the war she worked in an orphanage and created literature – poems and plays – for the children.

Beyle has played a central role in reviving and inspiring interest in Yiddish song and poetry among a new generation of artists, and her songs have been performed by many of the major names in Yiddish music. She is the only Yiddish poet ever to be awarded a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the top honor for folk arts in the United States.

She began writing poetry in German but in 1921, the year she emigrated to New York, she turned to Yiddish. In 1922 she made her literary debut in Di feder, NY, and after that she contributed poems, stories and memoirs to many newspapers and magazines.

Yiddish poems about mothers, in memory of my mother, Miriam Pearlman Zucker, 1914-2012. Yermiahu Ahron Taub grew up in an orthodox (non-Hasidic) yeshivish community in Philadelphia. He began his formal… Read more »