Rajzel Zychlinski (1910–2001)

Rajzel Żychlińsky was born to a religious Jewish family in the town of Gąbin, Poland, at the time part of the Russian Empire. Her father Mordechai Zychlinski was a tanner who tried repeatedly to emigrate to the USA, leaving Rajzel and four siblings with their mother Dvoyre (Deborah). Rajzel attended a Polish public school and was then educated by private teachers, as there was no higher school for girls in her town. She published her first poems in the Yiddish newspaper Folksaytung in 1928, when she was 18. She soon became known as one of modern Yiddish poetry’s most original voices. In the 1930s, she worked in an orphanage, then moved to Warsaw, where she worked in a bank and published her first two collections of poems. In 1941, she married Dr. Isaac Kanter, a psychiatrist, and the couple fled eastward to escape the Nazis. She spent most of World War II in Soviet-occupied territory, where their child was born. On her return to Poland in 1946, Rajzel learned that her friends and immediate family were dead. Finding anti-Semitism had not ended with the war, the Kanters left for Paris. In 1951, they immigrated to the USA, settling in New York City, where Rajzel graduated from City College and attended The New School. She published a total of seven collections of poetry in her lifetime, using free verse and sparse language to capture the devastation of the Holocaust.
She was honored with the 1975 Itzik Manger Prize, Israel’s highest award for Yiddish literature. Her work has been extensively translated and anthologized.