Ida Maze

The following poems are reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder. Requests for permission to reprint any of this material should be addressed to Prof. Irving Massey, at massey@buffalo.edu

Ida Maze (the surname is sometimes spelled "Maza") was born in 1893 near Kapulye (now Kopyl)in Belarus, Mendele Mokher Sforim's home town. She began writing poetry in the late 1920's, after the early death of her first son in 1923. Most of her life was spent in Montreal, Canada, where she died in 1963, having published four volumes of poetry; her autobiography, "Dinah," which covered only the years of her childhood in Belarus, was published posthumously. Her reputation has continued to grow since her death: she is the subject of a long chapter in Irving Massey's "Identity and Community" (Detroit, 1994), and there is a substantial article about her in the recent second edition of the "Encyclopaedia Judaica." Whereas initially only a few of her poems appeared to have lasting qualities, it now seems that at least a dozen, or possibly two, will enter the classical canon of Yiddish poetry.

The following 3 PDF files include a number of short poems.

The June 22, 2007 Forverts included an article about Ida Maze by Khane Mlotek.


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