Rajzel Zychlinski

Rajzel Żychlińsky (July 27, 1910 – June 13, 2001) was a Polish-born writer of poetry in Yiddish. She published seven collections over six decades. Her first two collections were published in Warsaw, Poland in 1936 and 1939, just prior to World War II. She survived the war by fleeing eastward to the Soviet Union, but many members of her immediate family were murdered in the Holocaust. Her postwar poetry, mostly written in the United States, was strongly influenced by these events.

Biography Żychlińsky was born in Gąbin, Poland to Mordechai Żychlińsky and Debora Żychlińska (née Appel). Both her parents were Jewish. Her mother in particular was devout and descended from a family from which many rabbis had emerged. Żychlińsky completed public grade school in Gąbin in 1923. Gąbin had no higher schools for girls, but she continued her education through private tutors. By then Żychlińsky was writing poetry in Polish and in Yiddish. Her first poem to be published appeared about 1927 in the Folkstsaytung, which was a Yiddish-language daily newspaper in Warsaw, Poland's largest city. In the early 1930s, Żychlińsky moved to Włocławek; she worked there in an orphanage. By 1936 she was working at a bank in Warsaw. Her first book of poems, Lider [Poems], was published in 1936 by the Yiddish PEN Club. It had an introduction by one of her mentors, the noted Polish poet and playwright Itzik Manger. In 1937, she won the Reuben Ludwig Award of the Yiddish-American literary publication Inzikh. In early 1939 her second book, Der regn zingt [The Rain Sings], was published in Warsaw. Most of the poet's family remained in the German-occupied zone. Żychlińsky's mother, along with her sister Chaneh, her brothers Yakov and Dovid, and their children, were ultimately murdered in the gas chambers of the Treblinka and Chełmno extermination camps. She lived in Lvov (L’viv) for a time. She then moved to Kolomyya, where she lived with the Kanter family. In January, 1941 she married Isaac Kanter. Isaac Kanter was a well-read psychiatrist who also wrote; he knew Żychlińsky from Warsaw. The German invasion of the Soviet Union commenced in June, 1941. Żychlińsky and her husband fled eastward again, ultimately landing near Kazan. Isaac Kanter served as a doctor in the Soviet army during the war. On February 15, 1943, their son, Marek, was born. she continued to write exclusively in Yiddish. Karina von Tippelskirch writes, "Zychlinsky wrote poems only in Yiddish, the mameloshn—her mother tongue. It linked the poet and her mother, and it remains the language that can carry the Eastern European Jewish world beyond its destruction by the Holocaust into the present." Von Tippelskirch also wrote: "Rajzel Zychlinsky (1910–2001) is considered one of the greatest Yiddish poets of the 20th century and a master of the small poetic form." Nonetheless, she is not famous even in Yiddish-speaking circles. Elvira Groezinger writes, "The reason for Zychlinsky's incomprehensible lack of fame may be traced to her life choices. She was not part of the mainstream of Yiddish poets, publishers, and influential people. ... Having no networks to support her career, she remained a lifelong loner and outsider." Barnett Zumoff writes that "she was the most authentic and original of the female Yiddish poets."

"God Hid His Face" The volume of English translations takes its title from the poem "God Hid His Face", which has been called "one of her most powerful and desolate." von Tippelskirch considers the poem in the larger context of faith in god following the Holocaust: "Like many writers after the Holocaust, among them Itzik Manger and Zvi Kolitz (1946) in his famous 'Yosl Rakover Talks to God', Zychlinsky struggles with faith, often referring to God as blind or absent."

In English translation by Aaron Kramer:

God Hid His Face All the roads led to death, all the roads.

All the winds breathed betrayal, all the winds.

At all the doorways angry dogs barked, at all the doorways.

All the waters laughed at us, all the waters.

All the nights fattened on our dread, all the nights.

And the heavens were bare and empty, all the heavens.

God hid his face.