2/11 | Birthday of Zalman Shneour
Today in Yiddishkayt… February 11 Birthday of Zalman Shneour, Hebrew and Yiddish poet and novelist Zalman Shneour was born on February 11, 1886 to a middle-class family in Shklov, Belorussia (today Шклоў, Belarus). Shneour was, from a very early age, an avid reader of Hebrew literature. As a teenager, Shneour left his home and went to Odessa, then the capital of Zionist and Hebrew literary activity, where he was warmly received by Chaim Nachman Bialik, who became a kind of father figure for Shneour. In 1902, Shneour left for Warsaw and found work in the editorial office of the...
Read More2/7 | Birthday of Moyshe Stavsky
Today in Yiddishkayt… February 7 Birthday of Moyshe Stavsky (Moshe Stavi), Yiddish and Hebrew Writer Moyshe Stavsky was born in the White Russian shtetl of Antopol (today Антопаль, Belarus). His father was a maskil who ran a grain concern and was a leader of the town’s Jewish community. Although young Moyshe loathed going, he attended the local kheder until he reached bar-mitzva age and attended primary school in Antopol. At 16 he left the shtetl and lived in Warsaw, Kremenchug, and for some time in Aleksandrowo on the border between Lithuania and East Prussia,...
Read More1/9 | Birthday of Chaim Nachman Bialik
Today in Yiddishkayt… January 9 Birthday of Chaim Nachman Bialik, Poet Chaim Nachman Bialik was born on January 9, 1873 in the rural Volhynian settlement of Rad’i (Рады) near Zhytomyr (the settlement no longer exists) and was raised in Zhytomyr. He began a traditional Jewish education in kheder and bes-medresh, and attended the prestigious yeshiva at Volozhin. It was at yeshiva that Bialik devoted himself to the acquisition of secular education. He left Volozhin for Odessa in 1891 to join the emerging Jewish (Hebrew and Yiddish) literary scene. In the early years of the 20th...
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