this may be a bit off topic but your interesting post on Jewish Women and words makes me think today of a Jewish woman very recently deceased. She was my grandmother and she often wrote poems for family occasions. The poems were not earth shattering but, in the context of a family ritual like a group dinner, they focused our emotional attention.
At the time, this seemed like a quaint idiosyncracy but after reading more Yiddish poetry, it was obviously part of a normative cultural tradition. The most telling attribute of this tradition is that the poems were not expected to be transcendent- more like Poor Richard's Alamanac ("a penny saved is a penny earned") than Shelley.
this may be a bit off topic but your interesting post on Jewish Women and words makes me think today of a Jewish woman very recently deceased. She was my grandmother and she often wrote poems for family occasions. The poems were not earth shattering but, in the context of a family ritual like a group dinner, they focused our emotional attention.
At the time, this seemed like a quaint idiosyncracy but after reading more Yiddish poetry, it was obviously part of a normative cultural tradition. The most telling attribute of this tradition is that the poems were not expected to be transcendent- more like Poor Richard's Alamanac ("a penny saved is a penny earned") than Shelley.