Literatureקדיה מולודובסקי

Kadia Molodovsky

Kadia Molodovsky was a Yiddish poet and writer, known for her poetry, her children's poems and the Yiddish journals she edited.

1894 to 1975Yiddish poetryChildren's poemsPoems on the HolocaustEditing the journals Heym and Svive

Born: 10 May 1894, Biaroza
Died: 23 March 1975, Philadelphia
Occupation: poet, writer, editing staff, teacher

Kadia Molodovsky was born in 1894 in Biaroza

Molodovsky was born in 1894 in Bereza Kartuska, now Byaroza in Belarus. Her father, a cheder teacher, taught her Torah, and her grandmother taught her Yiddish. Her mother ran a dry goods store and later a kvass factory.

She earned a teaching certificate and studied Hebrew pedagogy with Yehiel Halperin in Warsaw in 1913 and 1914. In 1916 she followed him to Odessa and taught young children. In 1917 she was trapped in Kiev, where she lived through the 1919 pogroms.

She published her first poems in 1920 and married the scholar Simcha Lev in 1921. In Warsaw she taught Yiddish and Hebrew and published poetry books, starting in 1927. In 1935 she moved to New York, and in 1946 she published poems written in response to the Holocaust.

From 1949 to 1952 she lived in Tel Aviv and edited the Yiddish journal Heym. She co-founded the journal Svive in New York in 1943 and revived it around 1960. She received the Itzik Manger Prize in 1971 and died in Philadelphia in 1975.