Rakhel Feygenberg

Rakhel Feygenberg was born in 1885 in Lyuban

Feygenberg was born in 1885 in Lyuban, in the Minsk Governorate of the Russian Empire. Her father, the son of the town rabbi, died when she was young. Her mother, Sarah Epstein, was a sister of the writers Zalmen Epstein and Yitzhak Epstein.

She learned Hebrew, Russian and Yiddish at home. As a teenager she moved to Odessa, where she worked in a clothing store and published her first short story in 1905. She later earned a teaching certificate in Saint Petersburg and studied literature in Lausanne, but left both studies for lack of money.

In 1914 she married the chemist G. Shapiro, and they had a son. In 1919 her home was destroyed in a pogrom, and she hid with her son. Back in Odessa, she wrote about the pogroms and helped collect survivor testimonies, later published as a book on the town of Dubova.

She left Ukraine in 1921 and lived in Chișinău, Bucharest, Warsaw and Paris. In 1933 she settled in Tel Aviv, wrote as Rakhel Imri, and worked as a correspondent for Der Moment, Haaretz and Davar. She translated works by Israel Joshua Singer and David Bergelson, as well as her own Yiddish writing, into Hebrew. She died in 1972.