Rajzel Zychlinksy z"l (1910-2001)
Yiddishe Poet

Rajzel Zychlinsky, the famous Yiddish poet, passed away on June 13, 2001 in Concord, California, after a long struggle with pneumonia.

She would have been 91 on July 27, 2001. She was well known for her  holocaust poetry and received the Manger prize in 1975 in Israel. One of  relatively few living Yiddish poets, the widely published Zychlinsky has  been writing since the 1920's. Between 1939 and 1993 she published seven  books of poetry in Yiddish. A collection of poems, "God Hid His face",  was translated to English and published in 1997. She has been  extensively translated and anthologized. She was included in  Aaron  Kramer's well known anthology: "A Century of Yiddish Poetry."

For the last two years she resided in a nursing home in Walnut Creek,  California, where her son Marek Kanter paid her weekly visits. On these occasions she enjoyed being read poems from her book  "God Hid His Face."

One of her favorite poems was about a neighbor across the street where she  lived in Brooklyn. It was performed by the Traveling Jewish Theater  in San Francisco as part of their 1998-99 production "Diamonds in the Rough." 

An article about Rajzel Zychlinsky appeared in the January 29, 1999  issue of the Northern California Jewish Bulletin, which contained the remainder  of Zychlinsky's poems performed by the Traveling Jewish Theater.

Rajzel Zychlinzky was born in Gombin, Poland.  She emigrated to the United States in 1950, with her husband and son,  having survived the holocaust by fleeing to Russia.  She continued to suggest changes and corrections to her  poems up till four months before her death. The last revisions she made were to her poem about a walk in a park in Warsaw, shortly before she fled to Russia.