Born Rosa Lebensboym in the Lithuanian town of Brisk, she travelled widely and restlessly between eastern and western Europe, Palestine and the USA, before settling in New York in 1913. While reporting on women’s issues for the Yiddish press, including the urgent issue of women’s suffrage, she began contributing to Yiddish literary journals of the time under the pseudonym Anna Margolin, which she would later adopt as her own name. Her poetry, at times impressionist, symbolist and post-symbolist, imagist and expressionist was difficult to categorize for the critics of the period and as a result she was both praised and harshly criticized by her contemporaries.