Burning Off the Page

Overview

Yiddish writer Celia Dropkin (1887 – 1956) both shocked and delighted New York literary society of the 1920s and 1930s with her poetic depictions of the passions, yearnings, exaltations and celebration of the body. Celia defiantly shattered the conventions of gender, sexuality and moral code. The legacy of one of the greatest Yiddish poets has been buried by time and repression obscuring one central fact. Celia’s work expands not only what it means to be a sexual being and Jewish but to be utterly, shamelessly human.