Desires

Celia (Tsilye) Dropkin (1887–1956) was best known as a poet whose work addressed sexual and erotic themes with a frankness that shocked readers and critics. In the 1930s she turned to prose, publishing Desires, her only novel, in sixty-eight installments in the Jewish Daily Forward, or Forverts. Like her poetry, Desires reflects on the internal and external conflicts of love, domesticity, and sexuality, as well as the competing impulses that are part of every life.

Desires, the only novel by Celia (Tsilye) Dropkin (1887–1956), was originally serialized between March 31 and June 6, 1934, in the Jewish Daily Forward, or Forverts. Dropkin, a poet known for sexual and erotic themes, was born in Babruysk, a city in what is now Belarus, and immigrated to New York in 1912, where she adopted Yiddish as her primary literary language. In the 1930s she turned to prose, publishing this novel and ten short stories that appeared in the journal Tsukunft (Future). In Desires, as in much of her work, Dropkin reflects on the internal and external conflicts of love, domesticity, and the erotic life. Through characters carefully drawn from her own immigrant milieu, Dropkin addresses the yearnings of both the body and mind, the tension between excitement and security, and the conflicting impulses that are part of the human condition.

Celia (Tsilye) Dropkin, née Tsipporah Levine (1887–1956), was born in Babruysk in what is now Belarus. After attending Russian-language schools and teaching briefly in Warsaw, she went to Kiev in 1907. There she met the Hebrew writer Uri Nissan Gnessin and began to write poems in Russian, one of which Gnessin adapted into Hebrew and published without acknowledging its source. In 1912 she joined her husband in New York, where she continued to write in Russian but also began to publish Yiddish translations of her Russian poetry. Known primarily as a Yiddish poet, she was also a painter and wrote short stories and the novel Di tsvey gefiln (Two Feelings, translated here as Desires) in the 1930s. Her poetry has been both lauded and criticized for its sexual imagery and eroticism.