Chava Shapiro

Chava Shapiro (Hebrew: חַוָּה שַׁפִירָא, romanized: Ḥava Shapira, German: Ewa Schapiro; 26 December 1876 – 28 February 1943), known also by the pen name Em Kol Chai (Hebrew: אֵם כָּל חָי, lit. 'Mother of All Living'), was a Russian Jewish writer, critic, and journalist. A pioneer of Hebrew women's literature and feminist literary criticism, Shapiro was among the most prolific of the diasporic women writers of Hebrew in the early twentieth century.

Early life

Chava Shapiro was born on 26 December 1876 in the shtetl of Slavuta in the Pale of Settlement. Her mother, Menuchah (née Schoenberg), came from a well-educated maskilic family in Kishniev and was proficient in Hebrew. Chava's father, Yaakov Shammai Shapiro, belonged to the prosperous Shapiro printing family descended from Hasidic leader Rabbi Pinchas Shapiro of Koretz, a disciple of the Baal Shem Tov. The family established in 1791 the first Jewish printing press in the Russian Empire, the Slavita printing house, and owned numerous paper mills, flour mills, and other industrial plants.

Chava had three brothers and a younger sister from his marriage to Menuchah, and Yaakov Shapiro had two daughters from a prior union. (Her sister died from scarlet fever in 1893 at the age of 11.) Although she grew up in a traditional Orthodox household, Chava received a rich education in both Jewish and secular subjects, and enjoyed her family's support for her literary aspirations. She was considered an illui from a young age and, unusual for a girl at the time, received lessons in Talmud along with her brothers from the local melamed, who acknowledged her coming of age as a bat mitzvah. Members of Chava's family corresponded only in Hebrew, and her mother hired private tutors to provide her with instruction in Hebrew, along with Yiddish, Latin, Czech, French, German, Polish, and Russian.