“But it’s not so tragic to die.Winner of the Lambda Literary Award 'A page-turner that brings to life turn-of-the-century New York's Lower East Side.' - Library Journal Born in a Russian-Jewish settlement, Gutke Gurvich is a midwife who immigrates to New York's Lower East Side with her partner, a woman passing as a man. matter-of-factly in an interview in July. “I would like to see it at least have a reading before I die, which I expect to do,” she told J. Her death was announced and mourned in the chat of the second event’s livestream. This summer, she worked with the actors who would perform two staged readings of “How to Let Your Lover Die” - first on July 30, then on Aug. In 2021 she co-edited a special issue titled “To Be a Jewish Dyke in the 21st Century.”ĭykewomon was one of five playwrights to have works selected for this year’s Bay Area Playwrights Festival, out of 240 who submitted plays. In “The Tribe of Dina,” a two-part special issue in 1986 dedicated to Jewish women’s perspectives, she penned a story from the point of view of a woman wandering in the desert with the Israelites after leaving Egypt. In addition to writing, she edited Sinister Wisdom, a lesbian literary and art journal, from 1987 to 1994. The 2009 novel “Risk,” for example, featured a Jewish lesbian who lives in Oakland and makes a living tutoring high school students. Though she rejected religion after becoming a radical feminist, she said, she studied Yiddish, Torah and Talmud while writing “Beyond the Pale” often wrote on Jewish themes and frequently included Jewish characters in her work. She was drawn to the area because of its Jewish lesbian activist community, she told J. Dykewomon spent part of her childhood in Puerto Rico, studied fine art at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and settled in Oakland, California, in the early 1980s. “If I had to do it all over again, I might have chosen Dykestein or Dykeberg,” she said at the time.ĭykewomon was raised in a fiercely Zionist household her father fought in Israel’s War of Independence, and her mother worked with a Zionist smuggling ring. She adopted Dykewoman, then Dykewomon, to demonstrate her allegiance to the lesbian community - but later regretted not using her name to assert her Jewish identity, too. The Jewish News of Northern California, in 1997. She wanted to distance herself from the Nachman line of rabbis from whom she descended, she told J. “May her memory be a blessing.”īorn Elana Nachman in New York City in 1949, Dykewomon changed her name after the publication of her first novel, “Riverfinger Women,” in 1974.

“We mourn the loss of Elana Dykewomon, a queer activist, author, and teacher with a fiercely dedicated readership,” the Jewish Women’s Archive said in a tweet, in one of many tributes to come after Dykewomon’s death.

Beyond the Pale by Elana Dykewomon