Author: Sheva Zucker

Dr. Sheva Zucker is currently the Executive Director of the League for Yiddish and the editor of its magazine Afn Shvel. She is the author of the textbooks Yiddish: An Introduction to the Language, Literature & Culture, Vols. I & II, and the editor and producer of the CD "The Golden Peacock: Voice of the Yiddish Writer" which features 10 Yiddish writers reading from their works. She has taught Yiddish and Yiddish Literature in the Uriel Weinreich Summer Program in Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture, currently under the auspices of Bard College and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and taught for many years at Duke University, as well. She was, for several years,the Translation Editor of the Pakn Treger, the magazine of the National Yiddish Book Center, and she writes on women in Yiddish literature. She has taught and lectured on Yiddish language, literature and culture on five continents. Read more at ShevaZucker.com.
Candles of Song: Yiddish Poems about Mothers Kadya Molodowsky

Molodowsky’s work reveals a woman striving to reconcile the opposing forces of religion and modernity, a realist and a skeptic who longed for miracles, a philosophic thinker who tempered deepest tragedy with irony and humor, and a spiritual seeker who despaired in God and humanity.

Candles of Song: "From My Slender Limbs" and "If.." by Rashel Veprinski

Rashel Veprinski (1896-1981) was born in the town of Ivankov, not far from Kiev, in Ukraine. She came to New York in 1907, and at thirteen she went to work in a shop. At fifteen, she began writing poetry, and was first published in 1918 in the journal Di naye velt (The New World).

Candles of Song: Yiddish Poems about Mothers by Rashel Veprinski

Although it is customary in the Jewish tradition to say kadish for 11 months after the death of a parent and although I do belong to a conservative synagogue it somehow did not feel natural for me, an agnostic, to say kadish for my mother, a Canadian born Yiddish speaker, also an agnostic brought up in the tradition of secular Yidishkeyt.