Anna Margolin’s, “I Once Was a Youth”

Resource Kit by
Barbara Mann

Module Content

Introduction

Introduction

Anna Margolin’s “I Once Was a Youth” (Ikh bin geven amol a yingling) is a fascinating and perplexing Yiddish poem, written in New York and published in Margolin’s only published volume, Poems (Lider), in 1929. The poem’s first-person speaker reflects on a diverse amalgam of cultural references, with a keen eye for historical evolution and change. This kit situates the poem within Margolin’s transnational modernist milieu and explores how contemporary readers might engage the poem’s complex presentation of identity, and the meaning of Yiddish as a marker of Jewish memory.
 
Cover image: A young Anna Margolin, early 1900s.