Rokhl Korn

The Road with

No Return
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The story…
telling
•By morning the whole city had
heard…

•Photo from:
https://sztetl.org.pl/en/file/5768
9
.

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Members of
the family?

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 Relationships: enumerate list of close – distant
relationship within the family?

Reflect on the relationship between: inside –

outside? What do you know about each of the
Structures pole withing the given opositions?

? See the motifs of past-present-future

substories? What do they tell us about the
general meaning of the story?
Choose ONE most powerful sentence from the
story? Why did you choose this one!

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Rokhl, Rachela…

•(1898–1982), Yiddish poet and short-story

writer. Raised on a farming estate called
Sucha Góra (Dry Mountain) in eastern Galicia
•Rokhl Korn was tutored in the classics of
Polish literature. Polish was the language of
her household, her neighbors, and her
education.
• She began her literary career writing in that
language in 1918, publishing two short
stories, one in Nowy Dziennik, a Zionist
newspaper, and another in Głos Przemyski, a
socialist journal….

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Seems It Had to Be
Seems it had to be that I should,
with a sole shirt on my body,
a last pair of torn shoes on my feet,
roam thousands of miles over a friendless wilderness.
Every doorstep and entryway greets me with suspicion,
nor will I have the familiarity of home, warm walls,
no fire in the kitchen prepared for me,
nor the smile of a mother turned toward me.
Jewish Women's Writing
Let the bare plank, that is both bed and pillow,
be harder than a rock under my head
so that even blue dreams elude me,
reaching up, like a golden ladder, to the distant plain of the sky.
It seems it ought to have been so,
that behind me fires would burn road and bridge.
Let my glance, if it struggles to look back
turn me into a pillar of salt.
May it come to dust and may it come to ash,
All the work and toil of my years
But let me be, with every new poem,
like you, my God, with each spring, reborn.
September 1941, Ufa
https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/language-literature-culture/pakn-treger/2017-pakn-treger-translation-issue/two-poems
6
 POLIN

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Jewish Women's Writing

Rokhl Korn’s short story … discussion

Kadya Molodowsky (L) Ida Maze (C), Rokhl Korn (R)
8
 Relationships: enumerate list of close – distant
relationship within the family?

Reflect on the relationship between: inside –

outside? What do you know about each of the
Structures pole withing the given opositions?

? See the motifs of past-present-future

substories? What do they tell us about the
general meaning of the story?
Choose ONE most powerful sentence from the
story? Why do you chose this one!

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 Havrutas
discussion…
.

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Bibliography:

• https://www.yu.edu/sites/default
/files/legacy//uploadedFiles/Acad
emics/Graduate/Azrieli_Graduate
_School/Research_and_Publicatio
ns/Prism_Magazine/Prism
%20Spring%202011%20Volume
%203.pdf

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