While at the university Debora Vogel wrote German poetry, but gradually became familiar with Yiddish literature and began to write in that language encouraged by her friend and colleague Rachel Auerbakh. She became active in Yiddish literary circles and wrote articles for various local Yiddish and Polish journals. She collaborated in the Lwów Yiddish journal of literature and art Tsushtayer (1929–1931), contributing a two-part essay on the art of Marc Chagall and other art reviews, besides her own poems and essays on poetry.
Vogel published two books of Yiddish poetry — Tog-Figurn (Day-Figures, 1930) and Manekinen (Mannequins, 1934), and a book of short sketches, Akatsyes Bliyen (Acacias Bloom, 1935) in both Polish and Yiddish. Her poems, prose and essays appeared in in the New York Introspectivist monthly journal Inzikh (1936, 1937, 1938) and in the quarterly Bodn (1937).
Tog-figurn collection is an example of literary Cubism with its characteristic play of contours, colours and geometrical figures, like, for instance, lines of the “grey rectangle” that stands in for the monotony of modern cityscapes. These “stylistic attempts” transition into the Constructivism of Manekinen, the reflections of the “decorative and consumption-oriented worldview”, where on the streets of Paris, Berlin or Lviv a person transforms into a mannequin, a half-mechanical, half-live decoration, combining a “machinic-mechanical basis” of life with “live matter”.
Links
yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Vogel_Dvora
jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/fogel-dvoyre
yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Oyerbakh_Rokhl
jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/auerbakh-rokhl
