Leyb (Lev) Kvitko

Among the prominent Jewish intelligentsia figures who were executed by Stalin as members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC), Leyb (Lev) Kvitko (1890-1952) occupies a unique place. Hersh (Hirsh) Remenik, a renowned Jewish and Yiddish literary critic, described Kvitko’s work as follows (by “Jewish writers” Remenik meant those who wrote in Yiddish):

“Of all the Jewish writers, Leyb Kvitko is perhaps the best known to the general Soviet readership and in the entire Soviet literature. This fame came to him mainly because of his children’s poems (…) 

Of course, Jewish Soviet poetry may feel proud of the fact that it has given the general literature such a great artist. But this fame and recognition of Kvitko’s talent as a children’s poet also has a downside: while praising Kvitko as a children’s poet, his readers often forget that his mastery is not limited to children’s poetry (…)

Truth to be told, Kvitko appeared as a literary figure primarily as a great artist of folk literature rather than a children’s poet. Of course, this includes children’s literature as well, but not limited to and by it… “

Yitskhok Leybush

Peretz

Yitskhok Leybush Peretz is one of the three classics of modern Yiddish prose, along with Mendele Moykher-Sforim and Sholem Aleichem. He was born in 1852 in the city of Zamość (Poland; then the Kingdom of Poland). Besides Yiddish and Hebrew, he was fluent in Polish, German and Russian. 

Unlike the other two classics, Peretz did not live in the Russian Empire and was not much influenced by its literature. His main source of inspiration was the literary world of Western Europe. His first publications were in Polish, then in Hebrew. Yiddish became the main language of his work relatively late, starting from 1888. 

As an author of vivid romantic works infused with elements of mysticism, Peretz may be considered a forerunner of the world famous Nobel Prize winner Yitskhok (Isaac) Bashevis-Singer. Peretz’s two collections of short stories, Khsidish (Hasidic tales) and Folkstimlekhe geshikhtn (Folkloric tales), his plays Baynakht oyfn altn mark (“At Night at the Old Marketplace”) and In polish oyf der keyt (“Chained in the Synagogue Antechamber”), as well as his poem Monish, had a tremendous impact on the further development of Yiddish literature and theater.

During his lifetime, Peretz had already become one of the symbols of modern Yiddish literature. When he died in 1915 in Warsaw, many thousands gathered at his funeral. Streets named after Yitskhok-Leybush Peretz exist in several cities of Israel (Tel Aviv, Haifa, Hod haSharon, Bat Yam, Holon, Kiryat Yam, Giv’at Shmuel) and Poland (Warsaw, Zamość, Kutno, Wrocław). There is also Peretz Square named after him in Lower Manhattan, New York.

Mendele

Moykher-Sforim

Sholem-Yankev Abramovich known by his pseudonym Mendele Moykher-Sforim is considered a classic of prose in two Jewish languages, Yiddish and Hebrew, as well as a pioneer of several genres of modern Jewish literature. He was born in 1836 in the town of Kopyl, known in Yiddish as Kapulye (Minsk Governorate of the Russian
Empire, now Belarus), but spent most of his life in Ukraine.

In 1867, Abramovich published a collection of Hebrew articles titled Eyn Mishpat (“Critical View”), which essentially laid the foundation for Jewish literary criticism. He also laid the foundations of the modern literary styles in both Hebrew and Yiddish. His short novel Di klyatshe (“The Nag”) was, perhaps, the first literary work in
Yiddish that attracted the attention of non-Jewish readers. The Russian poet Ivan Bunin translated it into Russian in 1880, and the Polish writer Klemens Junosza (Szaniawski) – into Polish in 1886.

Abramovich, later to be known simply as Mendele, began his literary career in Hebrew. His first work in Yiddish, the short story Dos kleyne mentshele (“A Little Man”) was published in 1864 in the newspaper Kol Mevaser. At that time, the Maskilim, adherents of the Jewish Enlightenment movement known as Haskalah, exhibited scornful attitudes towards Yiddish. Mendele’s work in this language deemed too elitist to many, supposedly unsuitable for the poorly educated audience who could not read neither Hebrew, nor Russian, German or Polish.

But it was precisely this “elitism” that turned his prose into a foundational successful experiment, on which all the subsequent masterpieces of Yiddish prose were based. For this reason, Sholem Aleichem called Mendele Moykher-Sforim “the grandfather of Yiddish literature”. Two novels are considered his most important works: Masoes
Binyomin ha-Shlishi (“The Travels of Benjamin the Third”) and Fishke der krumer (“Fishke the Lame”, later translated into English as “The Light Ahead”, for the 1939 film based on this novel).

Mendele Moykher-Sforim died in 1917 in Odessa, where he had lived for many years. Streets named after him exist in several Israeli cities, including Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Herzliya, Kiryat Yam, Ra’anana, Bat Yam, Rehovot and Holon.

Hayim Nahman Bialik

The poet Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934) is best known as a classic of modern Hebrew literature and its symbol, as much as Sholem Aleichem has become the symbol of Yiddish literature. However, besides Hebrew, Bialik also wrote in Yiddish (Sholem Aleichem, by the way, also occasionally wrote in Hebrew).

Bialik’s Yiddish works were an important stage in the general development of poetry in this language. His first Yiddish poem was Oyfn hoykhn barg (“On the High Mountain”), published in August 1899 (Elul 5659 according to the Jewish calendar) in the Krakow Zionist Yiddish weekly newspaper Der Yud.

After this early publication, his Yiddish poems regularly appeared in periodicals for about a decade, mainly in the same weekly Der Yud and in the popular St. Petersburg Yiddish newspaper Der Fraynd. Shortly before the Czernowitz Conference in 1908, at the time when the conflict between the Yiddishists and Hebraists was escalating, the editors of Der Fraynd took an unambiguously Yiddishist stance.

Four books of Bialik’s collected Yiddish poems appeared during his lifetime:

1. Fun tsar un tsorn (“On Sorrow and Anger”), published in 1906.

2. Poezye (“Poetry”), published in 1913.

3. Lider (“Poems”), published in 1918.

4. Shirim (“Poems”), published in 1922.