Rokhl Korn

The poet Rokhl Korn is the mother of Nordic folk-inflected Yiddish art song!

Korn grew up in Galicia, claiming to have no friends but trees.11 She moved to Poland after WWI, learned Yiddish from the man she married, and began to write in it—publishing stories and poems rich with textures of the living world. Beginning in the 1920s, she was an important Yiddish literary figure.

During WWII, most of her family was killed during the Nazi advance on Poland. She and her daughter endured what she called “wandering years,” moving from place to place in the Soviet Union. They lived in Kiev, Tashkent, and Moscow, where she was embraced by Yiddish culture workers like Der Nister, Shloyme Mikhoels, and Peretz Markish. Of her last meeting with Markish she wrote:

“In the month of April 1946, as a repatriate I was given an exit-permit to Poland. I went to Markish to say goodbye. In the beginning, Markish had tried to dissuade me from leaving. Nowhere, he said, would I as a Yiddish writer enjoy such bright and favorable conditions to write and publish my books. When he saw that I had firmly made up my mind he said: ‘Go, in the best of health, but don’t stay in semi-fascist Poland, go from there to America – or Israel!’”22

Korn took his advice and did not stay in Poland. Having barely moved into a new home in Lodz, she went to Stockholm for a PEN conference as a delegate of the Yiddish Writer’s Union. She stayed there for two years until, with the help of poet Ida Maze, she was able to move to Montreal.

A Yiddish poet in Sweden in the late 1940s was no rare bird: Yiddish was everywhere. There had already been Ashkenazi Jews who arrived in Sweden at the turn of the 20th century. Now there were all of Norway and Denmark’s Jews, plus thousands of survivors of Auschwitz and the Lodz ghetto—rescued in 1945 and brought to Sweden on the famous white buses.