She survived the war by fleeing eastward to the Soviet Union, but many members of her immediate family were murdered in the Holocaust.
Her first poem to be published appeared about 1927 in the Folkstsaytung, which was a Yiddish-language daily newspaper in Warsaw, Poland's largest city.
Żychlińsky and friends hired a cab and, for an extraordinary payment of 400 złoty, had the driver drive them east to the Bug River.
Żychlińsky's mother, along with her sister Chaneh, her brothers Yakov and Dovid, and their children, were ultimately murdered in the gas chambers of the Treblinka and Chełmno extermination camps.
Subsequently, she and her family resided in various parts of the United States, including Florida and California, as well as spending some time in Canada.
After the war and the nearly total elimination of the Yiddish-speaking communities in Europe,[8] she continued to write exclusively in Yiddish.
Karina von Tippelskirch writes, "Zychlinsky wrote poems only in Yiddish, the mameloshn—her mother tongue.
It linked the poet and her mother, and it remains the language that can carry the Eastern European Jewish world beyond its destruction by the Holocaust into the present.
"[9] Von Tippelskirch also wrote: "Rajzel Zychlinsky (1910–2001) is considered one of the greatest Yiddish poets of the 20th century and a master of the small poetic form.
"[10][11][9] Żychlińsky was awarded the Itzik Manger Prize for contributions to Yiddish letters at a ceremony in Tel Aviv on June 9, 1975.
Elvira Groezinger writes, "The reason for Zychlinsky's incomprehensible lack of fame may be traced to her life choices.
The volume of English translations takes its title from the poem "God Hid His Face", which has been called "one of her most powerful and desolate."