Gorshman, Shira
GORSHMAN, SHIRA
GORSHMAN, SHIRA (Shirke , née Grigorevna ; 1906–2001), Soviet Yiddish prose writer. Born in Lithuania, Gorshman immigrated to Palestine in 1924. In 1929, she went to the Soviet Union with a group of disillusioned members of the *Gedud ha-Avodah ("Labor Brigade"). Led by Mendl Elkind, they established the commune of Vojo Nova ("New Way" in Esperanto) in the Crimea. Gorshman soon met and married the artist Mendl (Mikhail) Gorshman (1902–1972), whose Moscow circle of friends included Yiddish writers such as Leib *Kvitko, who encouraged Gorshman to become a Yiddish writer. Her stories began to appear in Soviet Yiddish periodicals. Her first collection of works, Der Koyekh fun Lebn ("The Power of Life"), appeared in 1948, when the Kremlin supported Israel, which enabled the volume to include stories set in both the Crimea and Palestine. Her second book, 33 Noveln ("33 Stories," 1961), was published in Warsaw. In the 1960s–1990s, Sovetish Heymland regularly published her works and translations from Russian into Yiddish. Her 1974 collection of stories, Lebn un Likht ("Life and Light"), represents her output of the 1940s–1960s. In 1990, she again immigrated to Israel, where she published edited versions of her works, most notably her autobiographic novel Khanes Shof un Rinder ("Hannah's Sheep and Cattle," 1993), and wrote documentary stories about her life in Palestinian and Crimean communes. Volumes of her stories in Russian translation appeared in 1963, 1979, and 1983.
bibliography:
F. Forman et al. (eds.), Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers (1994); S. Bark (ed.), Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars: Jewish Women in Yiddish Stories (2003).
[Gennady Estraikh (2nd ed.)]