Hinde Bergner

Author of 'On Long Winter Nights' - https://books.google.com.au/books/about/On_Long_Winter_Nights.html?...

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674019690

http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/bergner-hinde

Hinde (Rosenblatt) Bergner was born on October 10, 1870 in Redim (Radymno), Galicia, a market town on the river San, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She was one of six children of Joseph and Bluma (Frayfeld) Rosenblatt. Hinde’s father owned a local granary. She describes how she felt caught between her family’s expectations that she assist her father in keeping track of grain production and shipments, and later the company’s accounts, and her own desire for a European education. Though Hinde was raised in a Hasidic home, she credits her father with having been more open to modern innovations and secular influences than her mother. Though her mother considered non-Jewish literature heretical, it was her father who hired a series of teachers at Hinde’s insistence to teach her German, Polish, and other secular subjects. Hinde describes her mother reverentially as a model of strict female Jewish piety who cared for the town’s poor irregardless of religious affiliation and who, on the eve of her death, insisted on getting out of bed to kindle and bless the Sabbath candles. This parental model that balanced a willingness to satisfy the intellectual ambitions of a daughter with strict adherence to tradition was representative of broader societal tensions affecting an entire generation of eastern European Jewish youth.

http://yiddishkayt.org/portfolio/hinde-bergner/