Description: "This fictionalized account of Rokhl Feygenberg's 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"-- Provided by publisher.
Brief description: 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
Review Quotes: An against-all-odds tale of a girl who acquires education in a society that doesn't value her for her mind, and who finds ways to imagine hope in circumstances of despair.-- "Jessica Kirzane, translator of Diary of a Lonely Girl"