By Debra Cash

Yiddish writer Celia Dropkin wrote not only of romantic love — a topic deemed quite suitable to women writers — but also of lust, anger, abasement, and violence.

Desires by Celia Dropkin. Translated by Anita Norich. White Goat Press, 273 pages.

How does a free woman navigate conservative times?

Think of Anna Karenina. Think of Hester Prynne. Think of Margaret Atwood’s handmaids.

The nature of a heroine’s erotic independence illuminates the circumstances that constrain her life.

Celia Dropkin (1887–1956), born Tsilye Levine in what is now Belarus, emigrated to New York in 1912 and began publishing poetry there in 1918. She had begun her literary career writing in Russian, but as a Yiddish writer aligned with (at least informally) the cadre of free verse “Introspectivists” who rejected “sweatshop poetry.” (Memorably, they dismissed it as “the rhyme department of the Jewish labor movement.”) Dropkin produced experimental, erotic work that celebrated the subjective experience of being a woman in a woman’s body.

As a Yiddish writer, her audience was entirely Jewish and made up largely of Eastern European emigrés like herself. Dropkin wrote not only of romantic love — a topic deemed quite suitable to women writers — but also of lust, anger, abasement, and violence.

For instance, in one poem, she compares herself to a windfall apple, writing

 

that fat worm—passion—

just won’t crawl out

of my juicy body.

I am left, discarded, as it

rots me to death.

 

Her contemporary readers were scandalized as often as — or maybe more often than– they were fascinated.

Dropkin wrote a single novel, but until literary scholar Anita Norich rediscovered it, Desires had been left to molder unknown and unread. Norich, emerita professor of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, had embarked on a years-long project to compile a list of Yiddish women writers who had been neglected by the men who compiled the Yiddish literary canon.

Poking around, she discovered that between March 31 and June 6, 1934, the Jewish Daily Forward (Forverts) had serialized Dropkin’s Two Feelings: A Novel About Jewish Life in America in 68 consecutive installments. The novel had never been compiled in a single volume in any language.

Retitled Desires, Dropkin’s novel opens like a Victorian tearjerker. We meet Shirley Elkin in extremis, at the bedside of her dying five-year old son, Izzaleh. Her husband, Sam, has stayed home from his office to wait for the doctor; in their shared fear —  and given her flushed, disordered beauty — he feels the couple has never been closer. Yet Shirley is fixated on the idea that her child is guttering out like a candle as punishment for a sin she has held in secret for the past six years: Izzaleh is not Sam’s child, but in fact the fruit of an adulterous affair with a shopkeeper named Harry Kroll, an affair that is still underway. Without identifying her lover, she blurts out the truth.

The child dies anyway.

All of this happens in the first six-page installment.

If this were a Yiddish melodrama, the blameless husband would throw his adulterous wife out into the street. Family and neighbors would gossip. The dishonored heroine would experience a dark night of the soul, and after a certain amount of struggle, would repent, aligning herself with her better angel (in Yiddish, her yetzer ha-tov). Older but wiser, she would be welcomed back into the arms of her loving family, because who doesn’t appreciate a happy ending when the curtain falls?

Well, that’s not exactly Shirley Elkin’s path. Because, as the narrator explains, “Her feelings for Harry did not impinge on her love for her husband. Harry had something in him that belonged to an entirely different type of man than Sam.” Describing Shirley in bed with her lover, Dropkin turns to an entomological metaphor: “Like a bee to honey, she had clung to him then. Every pore of her skin thirsted for him as if a billion microbes had wormed their way into her skin, making her blood feverish, leaving her depraved and wild.”

I can’t imagine how most people took that in 1934.

Early on, Desires’ narrator notes that Shirley is the type of person “who can feel things much more than reflect on them.” The author, on the other hand, reflects keenly, caustically, on Shirley’s entanglements with two very different men. Sam’s a good guy who loves his wife, but he’s also someone who is aroused by the vision of his wife with another man. Harry is a bounding “laydee’s man” — Shirley is not his first extramarital conquest — but his suave self-regard is foundational to his appeal. The counterpoint of a number of subsidiary characters — a jaded concert pianist, Harry’s bridge-playing wife, a detective who thinks he can get the disgraced Shirley on the rebound — throws the novel’s central dilemma into relief.

In a book exploring a woman’s sexual agency, Dropkin’s digressions into male perceptions take on a mocking tone. Sam, for instance, “believed that Shirley’s treachery had not been calculated. She seemed to him like a butterfly that had flown into fire and burned its wings.” Poor woman, confronted with Harry’s charisma, just couldn’t help herself. The admirer who hopes to win Shirley’s love for his own thinks, “Shirley was one of those women who would go out like a candle if they are not in love.… He looked at her now as at a miraculous lamp that had been turned off. Someone needed to turn it on so all its colors once again sparked. Who would be the lucky person to light that lamp?” Well, with that paternalistic attitude, it’s unlikely that he’d get the job of lamplighter. Shirley may be in thrall to her passions, but Dropkin is very clear that these passions are hers to do with as she chooses.

Published as the clouds of war were forming in Europe, Desires barely glances across the Atlantic. Instead, these new Americans are busy with bourgeois households, business dealings, and the hothouse pleasures of bungalow colonies. As a serialized novel, each episode is designed to be a bit of a cliffhanger. I have to admit, though, that the characters’ dithering occasionally made me want to yell at them to get over themselves.

Norich is a native Yiddish speaker (she learned English as a kindergartener) and her translation reads smoothly, the characters speaking to each other in literate English with an occasional interpolated phrase given a thick Yiddish accent like “awlrayt, I vil du dat” to show that they are still adjusting to the language. Offensive moments of offhand racism are regrettable but true to the time (in her introduction, Norich notes that she made the decision not to edit them out). The pious deus ex machina ending is disappointing, indicating that Dropkin or the Forward editor (or both!) felt the need to just wrap things up.

Yet if by the end of Desires Shirley Elkins seems tamed, Celia Dropkin’s voice remains a vital voice of female transgression.

New York audiences can attend an in-person screening of Burning Off the Page, a new documentary about Celia Dropkin, on December 10 at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

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Debra Cash, a Founding Contributing Writer to The Arts Fuse and a member of its Board, works at the Jewish Women’s Archive, which selected Desires as one of its Winter 2025 Book Club Picks.