Kadya Molodowsky was born in Bereze Kartuskaya, White Russia in 1894 to a family steeped both in traditional Jewish learning and modern Zionist ideology. Although a girl, she studied Khumesh (Pentateuch) with her father, a mekmed, a teacher, and later both Gemore and Russian with private tutors. She took courses in Warsaw and Odessa to qualify as a Hebrew teacher and in 1920 published her first poems in the Kiev publication Eygns. In the 1920’s she settled in Warsaw and worked by day as a teacher in a socialist Yiddishist Tsisho school, and, in the evenings, in a Hebraist community school. Her students served as the inspiration for much of her children’s poetry. Herself a fervent Zionist, she married a Communist, the historian and literary critic Simkhe Lev, and they lived, from 1935 on, for the most part, in America, with a three year interval in Israel. The couple had no children.
Generally considered the foremost female writer in modern Yiddish literature, and a first-rate and prolific poet by any standard, she published eight volumes of poetry, a collection of short stories, several novels, and also edited a literary journal Svive in New York. Here she published her autobiography Mayn Elter-Zeudns Yerushe (My Great-Grandfather’s Legacy) from 1965-1973.

Throughout her literary career Molodowsky grappled with the often contradictory forces inherent in modern Jewish life, whether it was the tension between tradition and modernity, Kheshvndike Nekht (Nights of Heshvan; 1927), poverty and childhood playfulness, Mayselekh and Martsepcmes (Tales and Marzipan; 1938 and 1971), the aesthetic, personal, and political responsibilities of the poet, Dzhike Gas (Dzsike Street; 1933,1936), home and homelessness, In Land fun Mayn Gebeyn (In the Country of My Bones; 1937), faith in or anger at the God who allowed the Holocaust, Der Meylekh Dovid Aleyn iz Gebiibn (Only King David Remained; 1946), or the messianic ideal versus the Zionist fun Barg (At the Foot of the Mountain). Amerike un Ikh (America and I; 1963) celebrates American ideals. In addition to his writing he translated books, poems and other texts from German, Russian, Polish, and English into Yiddish. An activist for Yiddish culture, he taught at the first Yiddish school in New York and helped establish Yiddish schools in the U.S. and Canada.