Yente Serdatzky


Yente Serdatzky was a Russian-born American Yiddish-language writer of short fiction and plays, active in New York City.

Early life

Serdatzky was born on 15 September 1877 as Yente Raybman in Aleksotas, near Kovno, Lithuania, the daughter of a used furniture dealer who was also a scholar. She received a secular as well as a basic Jewish education, and learned German, Russian, and Hebrew. The family home was a gathering place for Yiddish writers around Kovno, including Avrom Reyzen, and in this way she became acquainted with contemporary Yiddish literature.

Career

Serdatzky worked in a spice shop and ran a grocery store as a young woman. In 1905, the year of the Russian Revolution, she left her family and moved to Warsaw, to pursue her writing. There she joined the literary circle around I. L. Peretz. She had her literary debut with the story "Mirl," published in the Yiddish daily newspaper Der Veg, of which Peretz was the literary editor. Peretz supported her work, and published further writings by Serdatsky.
In 1906, reunited with her family, Serdatzky emigrated to the United States. After living initially in Chicago, she settled in New York City, where she ran a soup kitchen on the city's Lower East Side. She published short stories, sketches, and one-act plays in Yiddish periodicals including Fraye arbeter shtime, Fraye gezelshaft, Tsukunft, Dos naye Land, and Fraynd. She also published stories regularly in the Forverts, and became a contributing editor there.
In 1922, following a disagreement over payment with Forverts editor Abraham Cahan, Serdatzky was dismissed from the staff, though her demands for payment dragged into the mid-1930s. She dropped out of the literary scene for years, and supported herself in part by renting rooms. Much later in her life, from 1949 to 1955, she published over 30 stories in Isaac Liebman's Nyu-yorker vokhnblat.
Serdatzky's only book publication was Geklibene shriftn, published in New York by the Hebrew Publishing Company, in 1913.

Critical reception

Abraham Cahan described Serdatzky in 1914 as a successful writer of "tales of real life." The characters in her fiction are often women like herself, immigrants and intellectuals, inspired by left-wing political ideals, while facing disappointment in their everyday lives and relationships. Her stories at times convey a sense of "pervasive loneliness." She was called "The Queen of Union Square" by essayist Sh. Tennenbaum in 1969. Interest in her work revived in the 1990s, and her work remains a topic of interest among feminist scholars of Yiddish literature, and scholars of American immigrant literature and culture.

Personal life

Serdatsky married and had three children. At least three of her sisters also lived in the United States by 1952: Mary Press in Chicago, Yetta Chesney in Los Angeles, and Mollie Hirsch. She died in 1962, aged 85 years.

Translated works

Works by Serdatzky appear in translation in several English-language anthologies: