The Winding Road Trans. by Tamara T. Helfer

Rokhl Feygenberg became one of the youngest authors published in Yiddish when her autobiographical debut novel, originally called My Childhood Years, 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.

Translated from Yiddish, 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.

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.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Orinda Books