Even the Heavens Tell Lies

Born Blume Pfeffer in Chorostków, Galicia (now Khorostkiv, Ukraine), Blume Lempel overcame many obstacles to become a Yiddish prose writer of great originality. Lempel studied in a girls’ heder. A chance stopover in Paris to visit her brother on her way to Palestine in 1929 set her life on a different course. She married the furrier Lemel Lempel and in 1939 moved to New York. Writing under the pseudonym Rokhl Halpern, she published her first short story in 1943 in the Zionist Der tog, while her novel Tsvishn tsvey veltn appeared in the communist Morgn-frayhayt. Her works won Yiddish literary prizes, but at the time of her death, she remained largely unknown and untranslated.