Category: Candles of Song

Candles of Song: Yiddish Poems about Mothers Kadya Molodowsky

Molodowsky’s work reveals a woman striving to reconcile the opposing forces of religion and modernity, a realist and a skeptic who longed for miracles, a philosophic thinker who tempered deepest tragedy with irony and humor, and a spiritual seeker who despaired in God and humanity.

Candles of Song: "From My Slender Limbs" and "If.." by Rashel Veprinski

Rashel Veprinski (1896-1981) was born in the town of Ivankov, not far from Kiev, in Ukraine. She came to New York in 1907, and at thirteen she went to work in a shop. At fifteen, she began writing poetry, and was first published in 1918 in the journal Di naye velt (The New World).

Candles of Song: Yiddish Poems about Mothers by Rashel Veprinski

Although it is customary in the Jewish tradition to say kadish for 11 months after the death of a parent and although I do belong to a conservative synagogue it somehow did not feel natural for me, an agnostic, to say kadish for my mother, a Canadian born Yiddish speaker, also an agnostic brought up in the tradition of secular Yidishkeyt.