Bracha Serri

Bracha Serri was born in 1940 in Sanaa

Bracha Serri was born in 1940 in Sanaa, Yemen, to a religious Jewish family. Her father Moshe was a shopkeeper and a student of Rabbi Yihyah Qafih. As a child she came to Israel with her family, and they settled in the Yemenite neighborhood near Kiryat Ata.

She studied at a teachers' seminary. In 1963 she began studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she earned a BA and an MA in Hebrew and Semitic linguistics. She researched Yemenite dialects, especially the language of women.

In Jerusalem she joined a campus group working for the Yemenite community, taught Hebrew to Palestinians from East Jerusalem and started literacy campaigns among immigrants. She married an American man, had a son and a daughter, and later raised them alone. From 1989 to 1997 she lived in Berkeley, California.

Her first work was the short story Kri'a, published in 1980 in the journal Noga under a pen name. It told of a young girl married to an old man and was adapted into a play. After major presses rejected her, she founded her own publishing house, HaOr HaGanuz, which issued most of her later books.

In 2009 the documentary film Queen Hantarisha, about her writing, was released. In 2010 she received the Prime Minister's Prize for Hebrew Literary Works. She died in 2013.