Esther Kreitman

Hinde Ester Singer Kreytman (31 March 1891 – 13 June 1954), known in English as Esther Kreitman, was a Yiddish-language novelist and short story writer. She was born in Biłgoraj, Vistula Land to a rabbinic Jewish family. Her younger brothers Israel Joshua Singer and Isaac Bashevis Singer subsequently became writers.

Quotes

Yikhes (1949)

Short story collection, translated from the Yiddish by Dorothee van Tendeloo as Blitz and Other Stories (2004)

• His eyes burn like torches but he does not say a word. He looks at his mother with pity and clenches his small fists, thinking of Khetskel, of Shoshe, and of a way to escape. ("Shloyme")

• The women had descended on the Lane like locusts, looking for bargains. ("Breaking the Fast")

• She was standing over the candles and with both hands covering her face she had softly poured out her heart to God in heaven. ("Breaking the Fast")

• Bill looked straight through the old man. His thoughts were very far away. ("Becoming a Tramp")

• The baker's wife, who had been tut-tutting as her husband spoke, rejoined: "That's how they are. They don't know anything about compassion. For them, if you have money, you're lucky. If you don't, you can start digging your own grave. ("Becoming a Tramp")

• People make their way through the library like a dense forest, not knowing where it begins or where it will end. ("Two Libraries")

• The teacher is still basking in the beauty of his own creativity, when he realises that his only listeners are the walls. ("Two Libraries")

• The small house stands on its own, completely isolated. The houses on either side have been reduced to high piles of burned, crumbling bricks, broken, rickety furniture, and the charred remains of enormous black beams. All kinds of tools and appliances are lying around amidst endless mountains of broken glass. Inside the house, destruction weaves its silent web, just like the cobwebs appearing between the flowers and the grasses, which have sprung up wild and free among the ruins. (first lines of "She is Not Blind")

• Satisfied, filled with the warmth of the bright sun, the birds were singing cheerfully, oblivious of the war taking over the world. ("Blitz")

"Clocks"

• And there it was, in the ruined street, among the piles of bricks, earth, bent metal joists and glass, and the smoke and smouldering fires which the firemen had not yet managed to extinguish: the high-pitched, regular ticking of their office clock. It was still hanging on the one remaining wall, which was covered in black smoke. It ticked monotonously, vibrating slightly, like the only soul left living in a cemetery.

• The earth lay there like a corpse prepared for an autopsy, its innards wet and glistening. Sewage pipes were sticking out everywhere, like intestines falling out of an open belly.

• Bella was lying in her narrow, child's bed. She listened to the roaring Nazi aeroplanes and to the dull, faraway explosions and gunfire, which became increasingly clear as the planes came nearer. She heard the whistling sound of the bombs, which by now were coming down almost onto her own roof. As they fell, some of them wept like little children, others howled like mad dogs. She could see the flames through the window, rising up to the sky. Then another fire exploded in the blazing sky with such force it was as if somebody had poured a barrel of petrol onto a burning building. It lit up her girlish bedroom and the bed she was lying in.

• The alleyway exuded an air of Yom Kippur - beautiful, sad and eerily quiet.

• The air downstairs in the cellar was grey and foggy. It smelled of mould and the chill of graves.

• The small front garden was ablaze with colours and bursting with birdsong. The bright flowers of late summer were talking to each other intimately in their own, wordless language.

Deborah (1936)

Yiddish language novel Der Sheydim Tants, translated into English by Maurice Carr (1946), page numbers to 1983 Virago edition

• It was the Sabbath. And even the wind and the snow rested from their labours. (first lines)

• Hannah's words had pricked her like a needle. (Chapter III, p35)

• Sometimes, however, even the poems failed her, her harrowed mind would not be soothed, and then she would run out of the home and post herself in the gateway of the house. Or she would lean up against a lamp-post which stood a few yards away and which had not been lit up for years, and she would watch the children at play, gaze after the passers-by who came and went, intent on their trivial tasks, completely absorbed in their humdrum, humble lives. Healthy-minded people. They got on with their work stead-fastly, and it never entered their minds to ask what was it all about? What did they live for? Why? Why? (Chapter VI, p98)

• "So there's no lack of poverty anywhere-not even in Warsaw! Ah, well, you'll find plenty of misery everywhere..." (Chapter VIII, p150)

• The festive season was over, and this was the time of year when an old folk song haunted the air in town and village an old familiar melody that evoked a smile here and a sigh there:
  "Father, my Father, winter is drawing near,
  And Father, O Father, a Jew should know no fear,
  But look, O look, the snow is falling fast,
  And hark, O hark, at the spiteful wintry blast.
  See, there goes my roof, the water's coming through,
  Hurry, Father, hurry, send succour to a poor old Jew!"
  • chapter X, p190

Quotes about

• In modern Yiddish writing, the moral, spiritual, and emotional capital of generations of Jewish women was utilized by male and female writers alike...Female prose writers, such as Fradl Shtok, Esther Kreitman, Rokhl Korn, Kadia Molodowsky, and Khava Rosenfarb, also deepened the awareness and understanding of the feminine contribution to Jewish civilization.
  • Emanuel Goldsmith Introduction to Songs to a Moonstruck Lady (2005)

• As the only female writer in what many consider the most singular family in the history of Yiddish literature, Esther Kreitman and her small literary output have been overshadowed by the voluminous works of her brothers I.J. and I.B. Singer. Her notable contribution to Yiddish literature, unheralded in her lifetime, was to write in Yiddish in support of the haskalah (Jewish enlightenment) from a female perspective, an achievement made all the more remarkable by her lifelong struggle with depression and perhaps other undiagnosed emotional and physical illnesses which disrupted her ability to write. Her ruthless depictions of women’s place in hasidic society remain as painful as fresh wounds. In her autobiographical novel Der Sheydim Tants (Deborah) she wrote: “In his heart of hearts, Reb Avram Ber disapproved of his wife’s erudition. He thought it wrong for a woman to know too much, and was determined that this mistake should not be repeated in Deborah’s case. Now there was in the house a copy of Naimonovitch’s Russian Grammar, which Deborah always studied in her spare moments, but whenever her father caught her at this mischief he would hide the book away on top of the tiled stove out of her reach, and then she would have to risk her very life to recover it.”
  • Faith Jones, article

• Esther Singer Kreitman was called many things in her lifetime: unattractive, household drudge, hysteric, epileptic, madwoman, controlling mother, a woman possessed by a dybbuk. These were the words—or epithets—her family used. Less often used were the words that should have been associated with her: novelist, short story writer, translator.
  • Anita Norich article (2023)

External links

• Article on the "Jewish Women's Archive"
• Kreitman Esther on the Virtual Shtetl, Museum of History of Polish Jews POLIN