Rachel Herring was born on January 15th, 1898 in the village of Podliszki, in the former Galicia,
then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Born into a privileged family, Rachel was raised on an estate run by
her beautiful and inspiring mother. At the time, Jews under the Hapsburgs were able to own land under Franz Josef,
unlike their counterparts in Northern Poland. Well versed in both Ukrainian and Polish, Rachel grew up with her
mother and two brothers, having lost her father at the age of twelve.
Although too young to realize that her father was writing prose (mainly religious commentary), Rachel nonetheless
grew up with an attitude of reverence towards books and was always in the company of a well-populated library.
She was influenced greatly by the German writer Rainer Maria Rilke and the Polish writer Boleslaw Leśmian. During
the First World War the whole family moved to Vienna, where she perfected her German beautifully, and was further
educated.
She graduated Matura (similar to College) upon returning to Poland and was already
an established writer in her twenties when she married Hersh Korn in Przemysl.
Her earliest poems use the epic genre leaving out rhyme in favour of narrative.
Although epic poetry followed in the tradition of nationalism, and was not usually
considered a Jewish genre her background, being different from that of other
Jewish writers, allowed her a special understanding of one’s relation
to the world outside of the shtetls (small Jewish villages), and to the soil
itself. Growing up as a part of the only Jewish family in the village allowed
her to interact daily with non-Jewish people, enabling her to keep an open mind,
a facet which proved priceless in her poetry (Please see the Handmaid).
Rachel first published her writing in Polish and due to the toughness of her
language, the critics were convinced that she was a man. At her first interview
in Lvov people were more than surprised to find a beautiful woman behind the
intelligent, brutally honest poetry. If not for her pride, she would have continued
to write in Polish, as it was her first language. She was in her twenties when
her husband introduced her to Yiddish as a language, and, falling in love with
it, she decided to continue her writings in Yiddish, as Polish had come to represent
the language used by anti-Semitic compatriots. She was steeped in the culture
that she lived in, and wrote in Yiddish even though her stories contained nothing
Jewish about them. (Please see the short story Earth). During her early years as a Yiddish writer, esteemed writers such as Itzik Manger,
Melech Ravitch and Baruch Sheffner all came to be considered close friends.
Following the publication of her first Yiddish book came a lot of commotion,
welcomed for its novelty and creativity. One writer pointedly stated: “She
is short-sighted, but how far she sees.” Continue Reading
