Anna Margolin

Who was Anna Margolin?

Anna Margolin is the pen name of Rosa Harning Lebensboym a twentieth century Jewish Russian-American, Yiddish language poet.

Born in Brest, Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire, she was educated up to secondary school level, where she studied Hebrew. She first went to New York in 1906, and permanently settled there in 1913. Most of her poetry was written there. Margolin was associated with both the Di Yunge and ‘introspectivist’ groups in the Yiddish poetry scene at the time, but her poetry is uniquely her own. Though her reputation rests mainly on the single volume of poems she published in her lifetime, Lider, a posthumous collection, Drunk from the Bitter Truth, including English translations has been published. One reviewer described her work as "sensual, jarring, plainspoken, and hard, the record of a soul in direct contact with the streets of 1920s New York".