Shira Gorshman

Shira Gorshman was born in 1906 in Kėdainiai District Municipality

Shira Gorshman was born in 1906 in the small town of Krakės in Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire. She grew up in a poor Jewish family and lost her father young. At 14 she left home for Kaunas, where she joined the Zionist movement HeHalutz.

In 1923 she gave birth to her first daughter and moved with her partner Haim Hatzkelevich to the Land of Israel. They joined the Labor Battalion at Ramat Rachel in Jerusalem, where she worked in farming. In 1927 she left with the group that founded the Jewish commune Vio Nova in Crimea.

In Crimea she ran a dairy barn and met the painter Mendl Gorshman, whom she married before moving with him to Moscow. Encouraged by the poet Leib Kvitko, she began publishing stories in Yiddish newspapers. Her first collection, The Power of Life, came out in Moscow in 1946.

Many of her friends from the commune were killed or exiled in the purges, and she censored her own writing. She moved to Israel in 1990 and kept writing. In 1998 she published a memoir about the Labor Battalion, and she died in Ashkelon in 2001.