Chava Shapiro

Chava Shapiro (

Chava Shapiro was born on 26 December 1876 in the shtetl of Slavuta in the Pale of Settlement. Her mother, Menuchah (née Schoenberg), came from a well-educated maskilic family in Kishniev and was proficient in Hebrew. Chava's father, Yaakov Shammai Shapiro, belonged to the prosperous Shapiro printing family descended from Hasidic leader Rabbi Pinchas Shapiro of Koretz, a disciple of the Baal Shem Tov.^[4] The family established in 1791 the first Jewish printing press in the Russian Empire, the Slavita printing house [he], and owned numerous paper mills, flour mills, and other industrial plants.^{[note 3][5]}

Chava had three brothers and a younger sister from his marriage to Menuchah, and Yaakov Shapiro had two daughters from a prior union. (Her sister died from

In 1895, Shapiro entered into an ill-fated marriage with Limel Rosenbaum, the son of an affluent Warsaw banker, and their son Pinchas was born two years later. They lived in Slavuta with Shapiro's parents until 1900, when they settled in Warsaw.^[1] As her marriage deteriorated, Shapiro found refuge at the home of I. L. Peretz, who mentored her in writing. She participated in Peretz's Hebrew literary salon, where she met writers Mendele Mocher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, Ben Avigdor [he; ru], Hersh Dovid Nomberg, and Sholem Asch.^[8] Her first published work, a short story entitled "Ha-Shoshanah" ('The Rose'), appeared in David Frischmann's literary weekly Ha-Dor in December 1901 under the pen name Em Kol Chai ('Mother of All Living').^[9] Shapiro became a regular contributor of fiction and cultural criticism to the major Hebrew periodicals, among the only women to appear in their pages.^[10]

Shapiro soon began an

She was admitted to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bern in Switzerland, where she lived with her brother.^[10] Her thesis, written under the supervision of Ludwig Stein [de], examined the philosophy of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg.^[11] In 1909 Shapiro traveled to Göttingen to meet Edmund Husserl, who helped her obtain manuscripts of Lichtenberg's writings.^[10] She graduated with a doctorate in 1910 at the age of thirty-four, and returned to Slavuta.^[6]

Career

Early career

Shapiro continued to write short stories, fifteen of which were collected in Kovetz Tziurim (1909) Its publication became an important literary event because there were so few Jewish women writers at the time.^[8] The work is prefaced with the first feminist manifesto in Hebrew, lamenting the absence of women's voices in Hebrew literature.^[12] A lifelong Zionist, Shapiro visited Palestine in 1911 with David Frischmann and her parents as part of a delegation from the Warsaw Yiddish daily Haynt, subsequently publishing in Ha-Zman a three-part travelogue providing an account of the journey.^[2] In it she describes the developing Jewish community and its adoption of modern Hebrew. When she moved to Berlin in 1912, she established connections with leaders of the Zionist movement.^[10]

Shapiro began an illustrious career in journalism and literary criticism, writing articles in Ha-Shiloaḥ, Ha-Toren [he], Ha-Tkufa [he], Ha-Olam [he], Ha-Do'ar [he], Die Welt, and Selbstwehr [de].^[10][13] Writing almost exclusively in Hebrew, she penned articles about her own family history and reviewed books, plays, and contemporary European writers. Her first published essay—a review of a novel by Gerhart Hauptmann—appeared in Ha-Shiloaḥ in 1913.^[14] She traveled extensively throughout Europe, leading a "sophisticated, cosmopolitan life."^[15]

Life in Czechoslovakia

Shapiro fled to her hometown at the start of

She became a Czechoslovak citizen on 28 February 1929 and in 1930 wed Josef Winternitz, a Jewish community leader of Prague. The marriage was an unhappy one, largely on account of her husband's mental illness.^[3] In 1937 Shapiro succeeded in sending her son to the United States, where he lived in St. Louis, Missouri until his untimely death in 1953.^[1]

Later work

Before departing for Czechoslovakia, Shapiro published "Female Types in Mendele's Stories", an essay on the representation of women in the work of

In September 1942, Shapiro was committed to a psychiatric hospital by the Nazi authorities, and released on 19 January 1943 to prepare for deportation to the Theresienstadt Ghetto. She died on 28 February 1943, six days before the deportation of her husband to the Ghetto, where he was murdered on 18 March 1944.^[20] Shapiro left behind a handwritten personal diary documenting her life from 1900 to 1941, when she relinquished it to a stranger for safekeeping, which is housed in the Gnazim Archive in Tel Aviv. Letters and postcards from her 29-year-long correspondence in Hebrew with Reuben Brainin are held at the Jewish Public Library in Montreal.^[21]

Selected bibliography

• Em Kol Chai (12 December 1901). "The Rose". Ha-Dor (in Hebrew). 1 (48): 13–14.
• Em Kol Chai (4 October 1908). "Days of Awe". Hed Ha-Zman (in Hebrew). 209: 1.
• Em Kol Chai (1909). Kovetz Tziurim [A Collection of Sketches] (in Hebrew). Warsaw: Edelshtein.
  OCLC 25231247
  .
• Em Kol Chai (May–June 1911). "Notes from My Journey to Eretz Yisrael". Hed ha-Zman (in Hebrew). 107 (1), 108 (1), 117 (1).
• Shapiro, Chava (1911). Lichtenberg als Philosoph [Lichtenberg as Philosopher] (Dissertation) (in German). Bern: Max Drechsel.
  OCLC 1040214908
  .
• Shapiro, Chava (1914). "The Brothers from Slavuta (An Event that Occurred)". Ha-Shiloaḥ (in Hebrew). 30 (1): 541–554.
• Shapiro, Chava (1918). "Female Types in Mendele's Stories". Ha-Shiloaḥ (in Hebrew). 34: 92–101.
• Shapiro, Chava (1915). "On Death". Ha-Shiloaḥ (in Hebrew). 32: 63–69.
• Em Kol Chai (1920–1921). "Letters from a Tuberculosis Patient". Ha-Shiloaḥ (in Hebrew). 38: 122–131.
• Shapiro, Chava (1930). "The Figure of the Woman in Our Literature". Ha-Tkufah (in Hebrew). 27: 617–633.
• Shapiro, Chava (8 May 1931). "The Woman Reader: Where Is She?". Ha-Do'ar (in Hebrew). 10 (24): 386–387.
• Shapiro, Chava (1935). T. G. Masaryk, ḥayav ve-torato [T. G. Masaryk, His Life and Teachings] (in Hebrew). Prague: Brit Ivrit.
  OCLC 122855326
  .

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Chava Shapiro.

• Works of Chava Shapiro at the Online Books Page