Her Birth and Later Years: New and Collected Poems, 1971–2021, with Irena Klepfisz

Named a finalist for the 2022 National Jewish Book Award, Irena Klepfisz’s Her Birth and Later Years: New and Collected Poems 1971-2021 is the first complete collection of Klepfisz’s work covering the past five decades. It includes her innovative bilingual Yiddish/English poems as well as poems about relatives murdered during the war, immigration, office work, a lost Yiddish writer, a Palestinian boy in Gaza, and various people in her life. In her introduction to Klepfisz’s A Few Words in the Mother Tongue, Adrienne Rich wrote: “[Klepfisz’s] sense of phrase, of line, of the shift of tone, is almost flawless.”

Presented by the Jewish Community Library. No charge.

Irena Klepfisz is a trailblazing lesbian poet, child Holocaust survivor, and political activist whose work is deeply informed by socialist values. She taught Jewish women’s studies at Barnard College for twenty-two years and taught writing and literature at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for ten years.