Biography
Poet Irena Klepfisz was born in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941 and spent the first few years of her life there until her father smuggled she and her mother to the Aryan side in 1943. Her mother had Aryan papers and worked as a maid for a Polish family while Klepfisz was placed in a Catholic orphanage. After her father died what many would term a "heroic death" on the second day of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, April 20, 1943, Klepfisz's mother took her out of the orphanage and they survived the duration of the war in hiding in the Polish countryside -- passing as Poles by virtue of their Aryan looks[ii] and by only speaking Polish, which was, consequently, the child's first language. The mother and child were liberated in 1946 when Klepfisz was four. After being born into the harsh reality that was World War Two Poland, Klepfisz was one of the estimated half percent of Polish Jewish children to survive the war.[iii]
After liberation, Klepfisz and her mother moved briefly to Lodz before going to Sweden in the spring of 1946. The Klepfisz women then moved to the United States in 1949. Irena was eight and already spoke Polish, some Yiddish, and Swedish when she began to learn English in New York's P.S. 95.[iv] Although her English struggled, she began to take interest in great world literature at the end of high school, and began also to write poetry. At the same time, she continued to learn Yiddish through emersion in her neighborhood and attendance five afternoons a week and later on weekends at the Arbeter ring shule, the Workmen's Circle secular school.[v] At City College of New York, Klepfisz graduated with honors in English and Yiddish.[vi] Her bilingual poetry attests to her deep desire to keep Yiddish alive as a language connected to a deep culture.
Klepfisz began publishing her poems in 1971. Her first two published poems, "Searching for My Father's Body," and "The Widow and the Daughter," which come as a pair, speak of the devastating impact of the Holocaust on Klepfisz's life. These poems came out of six years of writing almost exclusively about the Holocaust following the suicide of Klepfisz's mentor and fellow survivor-poet, Elza, at the age of 26. Elza's death coincided with the suicide of poet Sylvia Plath, whose poetry, in the words of author Joan Michelson, "gave a license to a poetry of voiced rage by other women."[vii] In writing about the Holocaust and about Elza during the time after Elza's death, Klepfisz gave voice to Elza's madness by using her voice -- "the voice of the dead poet, the child survivor, the woman unable to be rescued" -- in many of the poems. In these first two published poems, however, Klepfisz uses her own voice in a poignant and honest manner to describe her life-long struggle with the destruction and alienation left after the Holocaust. Finding a way to describe her own experience was important for Klepfisz, who wondered during these years whether "the very nature of being a poet indicated that I too would be a suicide. Was it a question of time?"[viii]
Besides
Holocaust poetry, Klepfisz has written poetry about many other pieces of her
identity as a woman, feminist, lesbian, cultural Jew, and activist
against the actions of the Israeli government towards the Palestinians. She often writes in Yiddish (her pseudo
mother-tongue), and is respected as a Yiddishist. Klepfisz was the co-founder of Conditions magazine,
a feminist magazine emphasizing the writing of lesbians, the co-editor of The
Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women's Anthology, the editorial consultant for
Yiddish and Yiddish literature on the Jewish feminist magazine Bridges, and the co-founder of The Jewish
Women's Committee to End the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza (JWCEO). She currently teaches at Barnard College
while continuing to write, speak out for equality of the alienated, and to work
for peace.
Click here to continue to the analysis of form in Klepfisz's poems
“Searching for My Father’s Body”