Celia Dropkin

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Celia Dropkin (December 5, 1887 – August 18, 1956) was a Russian-born American Yiddish poet, writer, and artist. She was born in Bobruysk to a family that faced hardship after her father died. She showed early talent, studied in Russian schools, and taught briefly in Warsaw. In 1907 she moved to Kiev, where the Hebrew writer Uri Nissan Gnessin influenced her, and she began writing poetry in Russian. She returned home in 1908, married Shmaye Dropkin, a Bund activist from Gomel, and he fled to America in 1910; she and their son followed two years later.

In New York, Dropkin joined Yiddish literary circles and began translating many of her Russian poems into Yiddish for journals starting in 1917. She published widely, wrote stories and a serialized novel to earn money, but poetry was her main focus. During the Depression the family moved often, living in Virginia and Massachusetts before finally settling back in New York in the late 1930s. Her husband died in 1943, and afterward her writing slowed. She died of cancer in New York City in 1956 and was buried in Mt. Lebanon Cemetery in Queens.

Dropkin is often linked with the In Zikh (Introspectivist) poets, though her work did not strictly follow its rules. She frequently used free verse and believed any subject could be explored in Yiddish, not only Jewish topics. Her poetry is deeply personal, often dealing with love, sexuality, death, and relationships, and she faced criticism from some male contemporaries for her candor. She was friends with Zishe Landau and Anna Margolin, and wrote nature poems as well as pieces about her children. One of her best-known poems is Di Tsirkus Dame (The Acrobat), about life, death, and the relationship between performers and their audience. Some of her poems have been set to music by bands like The Klezmatics. A 1994 French edition collected about half of her work, and the first English collection appeared in 2014, The Acrobat: Selected Poems of Celia Dropkin. Her only poetry book published in her lifetime was In heysn vint (In the Hot Wind) in 1935; her children later issued an expanded edition in 1959. Dropkin also painted and won amateur art prizes, and several of her poems have been set to music by various artists.