Chava Shapiro (Hebrew: חַוָּה שַׁפִירָא, romanized: Ḥava Shapira, German: Ewa Schapiro; 26 December 1876 – 28 February 1943),[note 1] known also by the pen name Em Kol Chai (Hebrew: אֵם כָּל חָי, lit. 'Mother of All Living'),[note 2] 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.[3]
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.[4] 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.[note 3][5]
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.)[1] 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.[3] 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.[6] Shapiro participated in a local group of Agudat ḥovevei sefat ever ('Society of Lovers of the Hebrew Language'), which met weekly to read and discuss Hebrew literature.[7]
In 1895, Shapiro entered into an ill-fated marriage with Limel Rosenbaum, the son of an affluent Warsaw banker, and their son Pinchas was born two years later. They lived in Slavuta with Shapiro's parents until 1900, when they settled in Warsaw.[1] As her marriage deteriorated, Shapiro found refuge at the home of I. L. Peretz, who mentored her in writing. She participated in Peretz's Hebrew literary salon, where she met writers Mendele Mocher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, Ben Avigdor, Hersh Dovid Nomberg, and Sholem Asch.[8] Her first published work, a short story entitled "Ha-Shoshanah" ('The Rose'), appeared in David Frischmann's literary weekly Ha-Dor in December 1901 under the pen name Em Kol Chai ('Mother of All Living').[9] Shapiro became a regular contributor of fiction and cultural criticism to the major Hebrew periodicals, among the only women to appear in their pages.[10]
Shapiro soon began an affair with Hebrew and Yiddish author Reuben Brainin, a married friend of her parents nearly twice her age, whom she met in May 1899 while vacationing with her mother and son at a spa in Franzensbad.[10] Shapiro separated from her husband in 1903 against the protests of Brainin, who chose not to take a similar step (and would move to Canada with his family in November 1910). She moved to Vienna to prepare for university entrance examinations while her son remained with his father, and was granted a divorce in 1907.[8]
She was admitted to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bern in Switzerland, where she lived with her brother.[10] Her thesis, written under the supervision of Ludwig Stein, examined the philosophy of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg.[11] In 1909 Shapiro traveled to Göttingen to meet Edmund Husserl, who helped her obtain manuscripts of Lichtenberg's writings.[10] She graduated with a doctorate in 1910 at the age of thirty-four, and returned to Slavuta.[6]