Rachel H. Korn (1898–1982)

Rokhl Korn, née Häring, was born to a Jewish family on a farm near Podliszki, in Galicia, Poland (present-day Ukraine). She began writing poetry at a young age. After being educated at home in early childhood, she joined a group of students who were being tutored in a nearby shtetl, and read some of the classics of Polish literature. At the outbreak of World War I, her family fled their home, which was in a battle zone, and spent four years in Vienna, Austria. They returned to live in Przemyśl, Poland. Rokhl published her first poems in 1918 in Nowy Dziennik, a Zionist newspaper, and Glos Przemyski, a socialist journal. In 1920, she married Hersh Korn, a labor organizer, with whom she had a daughter, Irena. He taught her Yiddish, which became her preferred working language. During the 1920s and 1930s, she contributed to Yiddish literary journals and newspapers. Her first volume of poetry, Dorf (Village), appeared in 1928, followed by Royter mon (Red Poppies) in 1937. Her first collection of stories, Erd (Land, 1936), brought her acclaim. In 1941, she went to Lvov (Lviv, Lwow) to visit Irena, who was studying medicine there, when eastern Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany. After fleeing east with the retreating Soviet army, Rokhl never saw her husband. mother, brothers or their families again -- all died in the war. She spent the remainder of the war as a refugee in the Soviet Union. After being hospitalized in Uzbekistan, she went to Moscow, where she was welcomed as a colleague by the leading figures of Soviet Yiddish culture. During her two years there, she wrote some of her most powerful Holocaust poems. Rokhl Korn and her daughter returned to Poland in 1946, but with a couple of years, decided to emigrate to Canada. They settled in Montreal. The dislocation, loss and anguish of these years figured prominently in her first postwar collection of poems, Heym un heymlozikayt (Home and Homelessness, 1948). She won numerous prizes for her work, including the Louis Lamed Prize for poetry and prose (1950 and 1958), the H. Leivick Prize (1972), and the Manger Prize (1974), Israel's highest award for Yiddish literature.