Joanna Degler

"Derech naszim li" (Moją jest droga kobiet) – poemat Chany Lewin "Ejne wi a sach andere" (Jedna, jak wiele innych) jako kreacja (auto)biograficzna


[Derekh nashim li (I Am the Way of Women)– Khana Levin’s Poem Eyne vi a sakh andere (One, Like Many Others) as an (Auto)biographical Creation]
„Kwartalnik Historii Żydów” 2024 nr 3 (291), s. 633-650, https://www.ceeol.com/search/journal-detail?id=783


The article presents an analysis of Khana Levin’s (1900–1969) poem entitled Eyne vi a sakh andere, read through the prism of autobiographism. Khana Levin was one of the most eminent representatives of Jewish women’s literature created in the regions affected by the Bolshevik revolution. She was the first author in Soviet Russia to boldly and imaginatively reflect on the problems of female identity in the modern world. The fifty-page-long epic poem included in the volume entitled Tsushtayer [Input], published in 1929 in Kharkiv, portrays the childhood and youth of a character named Sima, who can be interpreted as the author’s alter ego. It describes the formation of the girl’s ideological profile against the backdrop of the financial and educational opportunities available in her childhood. Other important themes include the relationship with her mother, the crystallization of her female subjectivity, her first relationship with a man and first sexual experiences. Above all, however, it is an account, unique in the context of Yiddish literature, of the experience of a young Jewish female soldier for whom fighting and bearing arms becomes a generational, deeply formative experience, very closely related to body issues.. Should one consider the text autobiographical, it would be one of the most direct Jewish egodocuments related to women living before WWII.



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