GREENBLATT, ALIZA WAITZMAN

GREENBLATT, ALIZA WAITZMAN (1885–1975), U.S. Yiddish poet and Zionist leader. Born in Azarenits, Bessarabia, Greenblatt received a traditional ḥeder education. She came to the United States in 1900 and settled with her family in Philadelphia, where she was a garment worker. She married Isidor Greenblatt in 1907; the couple had five children. An active participant in Jewish organizations, Greenblatt became a successful fundraiser for the *Jewish National Fund, national president of *Pioneer Women, and an active member of *Hadassah. After a brief sojourn in Palestine in 1920, where Isidor attempted to establish a business, the Greenblatts settled in New York City, the center of Yiddish culture in the United States.

In her later years, Greenblatt collected five volumes of her poems which were widely published in the Yiddish press in the United States and Israel. These included Ikh un Du ("You and I," 1951); Ikh Zing ("I Sing," 1947); In Sigate baym Yam ("In Seagate by the Ocean," 1957); Lebn Mayns ("My Life," 1935); and Tsen Lider mit Musik ("Ten Poems with Music," 1939). Many of the poems were set to music and recorded. Greenblatt also wrote an autobiography, Baym Fenster fun a Lebn ("At the Window of a Life," 1966). She was a popular speaker at Jewish women's organizations across North America.

Greenblatt's collection of Yiddish books was donated by her daughter, dancer and medical activist Marjorie Mazia Guthrie, to the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., where the reading room was named in Greenblatt's memory.

bibliography:

S.A. Shavelson, "Greenblatt, Aliza," in: P.E. Hyman and D.D. Moore (eds.), Jewish Women In America, vol. 1 (1998), 552–53; I. Commandav, "Guthrie, Marjorie," ibid., 567–69.

[Judith R. Baskin (2^nd ed.)]