The Sabbath Candles
Now that you’ve become a wife,
Till one hundred and twenty years—
Make sure you have Sabbath candles
And candlesticks, two pairs.
On “short Friday,” little wife,
Remember even then
To light candles at sunset,
Don’t transgress the time!
Bless God with the Sabbath lights
Pray quiet, intense prayer;
Cover your eyes as is required,
But just don’t singe your hair.
And if ever you must leave your house
As the week draws to its close—
Remember to bring with you
Candles for the road.
Then you can stay in an empty field,
Alone in open space . . .
Just drip the Sabbath wax around
Outside to form a fence.1
Miriam Ulinover (1890-1944) was a poet born in Lodz, Poland, to a family that was both religious and worldly. Perhaps this early dual exposure to the secular and the sacred was a catalyst for her lifelong ability to move in both Orthodox society and secular Yiddish literary circles, where she stood out as a rare Orthodox woman poet. Her career began at the age of 15, when Sholem Aleichem first encouraged her to write by inscribing a book to her with the words “To the future sister author.” Early on, Ulinover wrote in German, Polish, and Russian, until she turned entirely to Yiddish because it made her feel at home. The folk culture that inhered in the Yiddish language, but which was dissipating quickly in the modern era, was probably one important reason for this turn. The circle of writers who convened at a salon she held in her strictly kosher home in Lodz had great respect for her work, even if readers and critics sometimes read it as entirely autobiographical. Ulinover herself pointed out in an interview that her actual grandmother was a sophisticated and cosmopolitan woman, unlike the traditional figure of the folk grandmother of her poetry, as found here in the poem above, “The Sabbath Candles.”
Miriam Ulinover’s only book of poetry was published in 1922; in 1928, Ezra Korman included several of her poems in his important anthology of Yiddish women poets, Yidishe dikhterins. Ulinover’s salons continued in the Nazi-run Lodz ghetto, from 1940-1944. Among the participants was the then teenaged Chava Rosenfarb, who was influenced by Ulinover despite being a committed secularist. In her postwar fictionalized account of the Lodz Ghetto, The Tree of Life, Rosenfarb includes the character of “Sara Samet,” based on Ulinover. Separately, when the ghetto was liquidated, both Ulinover and Rosenfarb carried backpacks of their writings to Auschwitz that were never recovered. Rosenfarb survived to go on to create a large body of work; Ulinover, sadly, did not.
It is not difficult to understand why the Bais Yaakov Journal in 1927 chose to prominently feature a poem told in the guise of a grandmother instructing a young bride on how to light Shabbos candles, on a page dedicated to Miriam Ulinover’s poetry. The poem was taken from Ulinover’s book of poetry, called The Grandmother’s Treasure. The editors of the journal may have thought of Ulinover’s bride as a recent graduate of Bais Yaakov and considered this poem as a continuation of the instruction they provided on how to be a pious adult woman. At first reading, it is a straightforwardly didactic poem on how to perform the women’s tradition of lighting Shabbos candles. Since the narrator is figured as a grandmother, we have the added authority of not merely a matriarchal transmission of feminine knowledge but a supra-matriarchal, intergenerational scene of instruction. The bride is taught to have candles and two sets of candlesticks, a detail that prefigures her need for an extra set, perhaps one for traveling. She must be vigilant about the approach of sunset, especially on the shortest day of the year.
But perhaps there is something else at work here in these ostensible traditional instructions. The poetic speaker recommends that she cover her eyes and “pray quiet intense prayer.” Covering her eyes shuts the rest of the family out of her awareness. Her prayer is solitary; she does not require even a husband to witness it. In the summers, the founder of Bais Yaakov, Sarah Shenirer, would lead the girls in communal hikes into the woods, and schools were communal affairs—even if new teachers were sent alone to their assigned positions (with Sarah Schenirer providing them with a copy of the Traveler’s Prayer for this journey). In this poem, Ulinover offers a more distinctly modern experience, where emphasis is put on the individual, outside of any institutional framework. This bride also encounters nature, but she does so alone, on a solitary journey outside any Jewish settlement; this is the circumstance that requires her to carry candles and candlesticks to observe Shabbos even on the road. In her book on Yiddish children’s literature, Miriam Udel describes how secular Jewish male authors writing for children in the early twentieth century depicted their female characters as having solitary adventures outside their homes. Ulinover’s poem does not explain why a bride might be traveling alone. Does her apparent independence follow the model of a new type of modern woman? Or does it go back further, to the tradition of a capable breadwinner who supported a husband who “sat and learned,” an older model for religious women. Is she exercising her new agency, as a recently married woman, to explore the world? The narrator imagines this newlywed woman in an empty field, alone in open space, a counterpoint to her earlier confinement in the home, the scene of her instruction. She is told to improvise a fence of wax around the candlesticks, perhaps an echo of the rabbinical injunctions to create a “fence” around the commandments. This is not a situation full of danger: There is no sense that she is being warned about being vigilant as a woman alone in the wood and can safely cover her eyes to pray. This is an act of an individual with religious autonomy. And even in this new situation she is taught to remember her earlier observance in the home. In her freedom, she must also keep tradition.
Ulinover’s bringing traditionalism into modernism is innovative, breaking with the established Yiddish secular culture of her time, in the name of continuity. In this way, she rejects the wholesale fears of Orthodox Jews about secularism while countering secular writers who seem to have rejected religion altogether. She was respected by her peers and was regarded as an accomplished modernist poet, although we can see in this poem why some of her critics thought she was naïve. Using a narrator who is a grandmother risks sentimentality. Despite this risk, Ulinover succeeds in demonstrating that modernism and tradition are not completely at odds with one another. However simple the poem seemed, it spoke of the complex existential position of its complicated writer. Perhaps the girls who read it in the pages of the Bais Yaakov Journal saw something similar in their own lives.
1Adapted from the English translation found in: Hellerstein, Kathryn. A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987. 1st ed. Stanford University Press, 2021.