Rokhl Feygenberg became one of the youngest authors published in Yiddish when her autobiographical debut novel, The Winding Road, was released serially in 1905. This fictionalized account of her own rough childhood in a small Belarusian shtetl in the 1890s is framed by the deaths of her father when she was five and that of her mother when she was fourteen. Forced to provide and care for her family, the narrator finds escape through books and is inspired by them to invent an alternate fantasy life for herself, transforming the challenges of her everyday into a dreamscape world of city life and romance.

In Tamara T. Helfer’s masterful translation, the narrator describes her fictional village of Bulin, deep in wild swampland and forests, far away from the world of books where she finds solace. Readers are enmeshed in the daily rituals of rural Jewish life, following the narrator through her long days of labor and caring for family. Her story, at times very funny, at times full of pathos, is a clear-eyed description of youthful imaginings with three-dimensional, flawed characters, and vivid descriptions of everyday shtetl life. The Winding Road presents an unvarnished portrait of nineteenth-century Jewish life and offers readers a deeper understanding of the vast distance turn-of-the-century women traveled to find a fully realized life.

Author Biography

Rokhl Feygenberg (1885–1972) was born in the shtetl of Lyuban, Minsk Guberniya. Orphaned at fifteen, she lived in various cities throughout Europe and Israel before settling permanently in Tel Aviv in 1933. Among the earliest women professional authors published in the Yiddish press, Feygenberg went on to write novels, plays, essays, and a significant body of journalism in Yiddish and Hebrew. Feygenberg’s 1926 book about the Dubova pogroms was instrumental in the defense and acquittal of Shalom Schwarzbard.

Tamara T. Helfer was a 2023 Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow. She is a former research astronomer, science educator, and program developer with broad interests in the intersection of history, genealogy, and storytelling.

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