Yente Serdatzky (also Serdatsky and Sardatsky; Yiddish: יענטע סערדאַצקי; September 15, 1877 – May 1, 1962) was a Russian-born American Yiddish-language writer of short fiction and plays, active in New York City.

[9] Yente Serdatzky's literary work was carried out in relation to the social and political upheavals that shaped the writer's own life and informed her approach to literature.

"Mirl," a semi-autobiographical story written before Serdatzky's immigration to the United States, shows how a young Jewish woman's exposure to socialist ideals opens her eyes to the oppressiveness of her family life, compelling her to seek intellectual freedom in an urban environment that ultimately cannot provide her with the rewarding relationships she craves.

"Confession," written long after Serdatzky's immigration to the United States, also questions whether existing political paradigms can meet the needs of women in a manner that provides them with both fulfillment and stability, even as they center the concerns of men.

"Confession" transfers Serdatzky's earliest reflections, which appear in "Mirl", to the New York context, by considering how left-wing movements subordinate immigrant women, who are especially susceptible to violence.

[citation needed] Yente Serdatzky's first published story, “Mirl,”[13] thematically parallels the author's personal trajectory as a wife, mother, and revolutionary thinker who left her family and husband in 1905 to pursue her literary career in Warsaw.

On the other, this theme speaks to the battle that takes place within Mirl herself, as she seeks to negotiate her conflicting positions as wife, mother, and intellectual in an environment that stifles her talent.

[13] As a young girl, Mirl trusts that her marriage to Shmuel will provide her with a way out of her parents’ home, which is described as a suffocatingly crowded space that restricts her expression and movement alike.

[13] Mirl dreams of fully participating in the emerging leftist political conversations that take place between Shmuel and his friends, which she believes are capable of establishing a new, free world.

The text takes the form of a monologue given by Mary Rubin, a Jew from Poland who grew up in the former Pale of Settlement and immigrated to New York to escape political persecution after the 1905 Russian revolution.

While the narrator quietly hopes that she will be met by a relative who will bestow an inheritance on her, she encounters Rubin, a sick woman who feels compelled to confide in her before she dies.

[citation needed] Born into poverty, Rubin had to work from the age of twelve and started to contribute to socialist actions in the years preceding the 1905 Russian revolution.

While her friend tells her that Hyman has a history of abandoning his girlfriends, Rubin believes in the authenticity of his love for her and supports him financially, in accordance with the changing expectations of women and labor advanced by the socialist thinkers surrounding her.

At the end of the confession, Rubin asks the narrator what will become of her female friends, as she worries that their destitution might lead them to prostitution or render them vulnerable to other types of sexual exploitation.

While a wealthy woman and her friends provide for Rubin as an act of charity, she remains terrified of the economic and social conditions that threaten to consume the lives of immigrants like her.

As scholars have explained, the Yiddish poet Yankev Glatshteyn argued that the perception of Serdatzky as "angry" led to a lamentable lack of serious engagement with her work and resulted in the financial problems that plagued her life.