Moïse, Penina.

Abraham Moïse, a Sephardic Jew, immigrated to the West Indies from France and became a successful businessman; he later fled (1791) to Charleston, South Carolina, with his wife, Sarah, in the midst of a slave insurrection. Penina, the Moïse's sixth child (of nine), was born on April 23, 1797, in Charleston, SC. Abraham Moïse died when Penina was twelve, leaving the family impoverished. Penina took on a majority of the household management and dropped out of school to care for her mother and siblings. She managed to find time to study on her own and began to write Jewish hymns, poems and odes.

Her first published poem appeared in a Charleston newspaper in 1819. For the next six decades, Moïse's stories, poems and essays appeared in national magazines such as Godey's Ladies' Book and local newspapers from New Orleans to New York. She was a regular contributor to Isaac Leeser's Occident and American Jewish Advocate, an early English language Jewish newspaper. Moïse first won national artistic acclaim in 1833 when she published Fancy's Sketch Book, a collection of her poems.

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