- Shira Gorshman
Shira Gorshman (
April 10 ,1906 –April 4 ,2001 ) was aYiddish language short story writer and memoirist. She was born in the small town ofKrakės ,Lithuania to an extremely poor family and began working at a young age. She was able to achieve a basic education, and like manyEastern Europe an Jews was multi-lingual. She was self-supporting by the time she was 14, and had her first daughter when she was 16.At a young age she moved to
Kaunas , where she became active in Zionist organizations. In 1924 she moved toPalestine as a pioneer, and there worked doing heavy labor in the commune called [http://www.wzo.org.il/home/aliyah/third.htm Gdud ha-Avodah] , a short-lived, left-wing Zionist organization intended to create mobile labor pools for thenascent Jewish colonies in Palestine . In Gdud ha-Avodah, members worked and lived together, pooling all income, while completing major construction projects such as road-building.In 1928, with others from this group, Gorshman returned to the Soviet Union to build another utopian commune, this one an agricultural colony in
Crimea . Her much later memoir, "In di shpurn fun gdud ha-avodah" (In the Footsteps of Gdud ha-Avodah), published in 1998, describes both communal undertakings.In Crimea she met Mendl Gorshman, a painter, and they moved to Moscow together. There she began writing. Her stories were published in Yiddish newspapers in Kiev and Moscow, and in numerous anthologies. She remained in Moscow for many years, writing short stories and
memoir s. "The central hero in her work is the woman as a folk-figure in this uneasy historical epoch," wroteThe Forward in herobituary . "This particular figure, through whom the writer embodied the important problems of reality, always appears in a time when the foundations of old forms of social organization are broken, and new relationships and alliances in social life and in the life of a new kind of family are being constructed." Gorshman moved toIsrael in 1990, where she continued to write and publish her stories. She died inAshqelon in 2001.Her books include "Der koyekh fun lebn" (The Power of Life), "33 noveln" (33 Stories), "Lebn un likht" (Life and Light), "Yontef in mitn vokh" (Mid-Week Holiday), "Oysdoyer" (Resistance), "Khanes shof un rinder" (Chana’s Sheep and Cows), "Ikh hob lib arumforn" (I Love to Wander), "Vi tsum ershtn mol" (As If For the First Time), "On a gal" (Without Malice), and the aforementioned "In di shpurn fun gdud ha-avodah". Very little of her work is available in English translation, but a story of hers appears in the
anthology [http://www.secondstorypress.on.ca/books/foundtreasures.html "Found Treasures"] and another is found in [http://www.twbookmark.com/books/39/0446691364/index.html "Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars"] .Bibliography
Obituary, "Forverts" (
The Forward ), April 13, 2001. (In Yiddish).Author biography, "Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers". Toronto: Second Story Press, 1994.
Jones, Faith. " [http://www.jbooks.com/secularculture/Jones.htm Shira Gorshman: A Life in Three Acts] ." JBooks.com.
"Rossiyskaya Evreiskaya Entsiclopediya". Moscow, 1995. (In Russian).
External links
* [http://www.jcpa.org/cjc/cjc-chernin-s02.htm An article about post-Soviet Yiddish that mentions Shira Gorshman]
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