Literatureרחל פישמן

Rokhl Fishman

Rokhl Fishman was an Israeli poet born in the United States who wrote in Yiddish and received the Itzik Manger Prize in 1978.

1935 to 1984Yiddish poetryMembership in Yung YisroelThe collection Wild She-Goat

Occupation: poet

Rokhl Fishman was born in 1935

Fishman was born in Philadelphia in 1935 to Jewish activists Sonia and Aaron Fishman. Her brother was the sociolinguist Joshua Fishman. From 1941 to 1949 she went with him to a secular Jewish camp.

In 1949 the family moved to Los Angeles, where she was active in the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement. In 1953 she trained in agriculture in New York and New Jersey and met Theodore Holdheim, a mathematician and musician. In 1954 she married him and moved with him to kibbutz Beit Alfa in Israel.

She began writing poems young, guided by Malka Heifetz Tussman. In Israel she joined the Yung Yisroel group as its youngest member, and Abraham Sutzkever encouraged her writing. Her poems dealt with her surroundings, nature and animals, and her first book, Zun iber alts, came out in 1960.

Her later poems described a long illness. Her last two collections appeared in Yiddish and Hebrew, though she wrote only in Yiddish. She and her husband adopted two sons, and she died at Beit Alfa in 1984.