Influential Jewish Lesbian author Elana Dykewomon passed away on August 7, 2022. She was 72 years old. Her brother Daniel Nachman said the cause was complications of esophageal cancer.
Dykewomon’s published works, listed below, spanned more than 40 years. The Lambda Literary Award winner was born Elana Nachman in New York City in 1949. After the publication of her first novel, Riverfinger Women, in 1974, she changed her name to Dykewoman, then Dykewomon, to show solidarity for the nascent lesbian community.
Dykewomon was raised in a strongly Zionist household; her mother worked with a Zionist smuggling ring and her father fought in Israel’s War of Independence. She spent time as a child in Puerto Rico, studied fine art at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and, in the 1980s, settled in Oakland, California. She was looking for a strong Jewish lesbian activist community, and found it in Oakland. Her 2009 novel Risk features a Jewish lesbian who lives in Oakland.
Dykewomon was involved in “Sinister Wisdom”, a lesbian literary and art journal, through the years 1987 to 1994. She was a playwright and, in fact, died just minutes before her play “How to Let Your Lover Die”, inspired by the 2016 death of her wife Susan Levinkind, was to be performed. “I would like to see it at least have a reading before I die, which I expect to do,” she told JTA/J.
Photograph copyright Jane Tyska/East Bay Times, via New York Times/Getty Images.
Brief Bibliography
- Riverfinger Women (1974)
- Nothing Will Be As Sweet As The Taste (1995)
- Beyond The Pale (1997)
- Moon Creek Road (2003)
- Risk (2009)
- What Can I Ask (2015)
