ROZE
(ZELDE-REYZL) NEVADOVSKI (October 21, 1899-September 26, 1971)
She was born in Bialystok, Russian
Poland. Aside from secular subject
matter in a Bialystok commercial school, she studied Yiddish and Hebrew with
private tutors. She early on became
acquainted with Russian poetry. On her
own she began stealthily to write and then went abroad to pursue her
studies. She attended the universities
of Ghent and Brussels and the Free Russian Academy in Berlin under the
directorship of the Russian poet Andrei Biely.
For a short she worked in the Curie Laboratory at the Sorbonne. During WWI amid the ferment of revolutions
and social unrest thereafter, she wandered from one place to another: “I am
exhausted to the bone, / My heart is cut and opened. / Stones and sharp teeth /
Have fallen all over my body.” (“In vogl” [Wandering]) After roaming across Europe, in 1928 she
finally reached the United States, was a teacher of literature and languages in
the Bialystok Youth Association, the Sholem Aleichem Folk School, and elsewhere
in New York. Her first writing years were
tied up with Russian, switching to Yiddish only later. From 1933 she published poems and essays in: Di tsukunft (The future), Fraye arbeter-shtime (Free voice of
labor), Oyfkum (Arise), Naylebn (New life); Di feder (The pen); Der tog
(The day), Der amerikaner (The
American), Morgn-zhurnal (Morning
journal), Kinder-zhurnal (Children’s
magazine), and Byalistoker shtime (Voice
of Bialystok) in New York; Kalifornyer yidishe
shtime (Jewish voice of California) in Los Angeles; Shikage (Chicago) and Brikn
(Bridges) in Chicago; Keneder odler
(Canadian eagle) in Montreal; and in the European Yiddish publications, Byalistoker shtime in Bialystok, Vokhnblat far literatur (Weekly writing for
literature) in Warsaw, and elsewhere. He
edited: Khayim Shapiro’s jubilee publication, Chaim Shapiro: Fifty Years of His Life (1937); Max Sherman’s Lider (Poetry) (1934), and Teater-zhurnal (Theater journal)—all in
Los Angeles. Her books include: Azoy bin ikh, lider (1933-1936) (That’s
how I am, poems, 1933-1936) (Los Angeles, 1936), 156 pp.; Lider mayne (My poems) (Tel Aviv: Perets Publ., 1974), 272 pp. She died in New York. As Sh. Tenenboym put it: “In addition, her
poems are lyrical, purely lyrical…[and] they have a social content…. Their beauty and song surround the poetess, and
she grasps sorrow with deep feeling…. A
subtly sensitive feminine poetess…. You
are close to the hidden nuances of pain….
At the same time, she possesses as well a sensing of the scope of the
magnificent, not only the delicate and quietly lyrical.”
Sources:
F. Kaplan, in Unzer lebn (Bialystok)
(January 28, 1937); Sh. Tenenboym, in Idisher
kuryer (Chicago) (May 7, 1939), republished in Literarishe bleter (Warsaw) (August 1939); Hamshekh anthology, edited by Moyshe Shtarkman (New York, 1945),
pp. 374-78; Amerike in yidishn vort
(America in the Yiddish word) (New York, 1955), pp. 753-56.
Benyomen Elis
[Additional
information from: Berl Kagan, comp., Leksikon
fun yidish-shraybers (Biographical dictionary of Yiddish writers) (New
York, 1986), col. 392.]
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