Deborah Romm–the “Widow-Printer”

One of the most significant phenomena in the history of the Jews in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe was book printing and publishing. The largest and the most prestigious printing and publishing house was the well-known “The Widow and Brothers Romm,” which operated in Vilna (Vilnius). This printing house gained worldwide fame mainly thanks to Deborah Romm, known in the Jewish world as “The Widow.” The titles she published included Enlightened literature, exegetical and ethical texts, belles-lettres (poetry, philosophy, popular science, folk medicine, and history books in Hebrew and Yiddish), as well as books in other languages. Significantly, many nineteenth-century Yiddish and Hebrew writers gained fame only because she recognized their potential and published their books. This printing house, “shaped” the nineteenth-century Jewish bookcase. Likewise, there was no Jew, certainly not a Jewish woman, who had such a significant influence on the cultural world of an entire generation as Deborah Romm.