Shira Gorshman

Shira Gorshman (April 10, 1906 – April 4, 2001) was a Yiddish language short story writer and memoirist. Biography She was born in the small town of Krakės in the Kovno Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Lithuania) to an extremely poor family and began working at a young age. She was able to achieve a basic education, and like many Lithuanian Jews was multi-lingual. She was self-supporting by the time she was 14, and had her first daughter when she was 16. At a young age, Gorshman moved to Kaunas, where she became active in Zionist organizations. In 1924, she moved to Palestine as a pioneer, and there worked doing heavy labor with Gdud HaAvoda, a short-lived, left-wing Zionist organization intended to create mobile labor pools for the nascent Jewish colonies in Palestine. In Gdud ha-Avodah, members worked and lived together, pooling all income, while completing major construction projects such as road-building. In 1928, with others from this group, Gorshman returned to the Soviet Union to build another utopian commune, this one an agricultural colony in Crimea. Her much later memoir, (In the Footsteps of Gdud ha-Avodah), published in 1998, describes both communal undertakings.