Yiddishkayt | yiddish poetry

3/20 | Birthday of Moyshe Kulbak

Today in Yiddishkayt… March 20 Birthday of Moyshe Kulbak, Poet Moyshe Kulbak was born in Smorgon (today Смаргонь, Belarus), Vilna Province of the Russian Empire on March 20, 1896. The small town had a legendary status among the Jews of the area. The Radziwill family, which historically controlled the region, had set up a circus bear training academy in the town and created thriving leather and tanning industry as well as a tar manufacturing concern. The surreal mix of circus bears and local laborers making their living from the land would eventually be immortalized in Kulbak’s...

Today in Yiddishkayt… February 27 Birthday of Zusman Segalowicz, Yiddish poet, novelist, and journalist Zusman Segalowicz, once heralded as “the most popular writer in Poland, now in Lithuania, and apparently the most productive,” was born on February 27, 1884. Segalowicz published poetry and essays in the newspapers of the many places he lived: Saint Petersburg, Warsaw, Odessa, Kiev, Moscow, and the Crimea. After the 1917 revolution, Segalowicz settled in Warsaw and became editor of one of its most popular dailies, Haynt. His memoir Tlomatske 13 described the vibrant...

Today in Yiddishkayt… February 24 Birthday of Shmuel Yankev Imber, Yiddish & Polish Poet Shmuel Yankev Imber was born on February 24, 1889 in Sassów (today: Сасів, Ukraine) into a literary family, his great-uncle wrote the poem “תּקװתנו” (“Our Hope”), which later evolved into the Israeli national anthem. Imber grew up near Tarnopol in Eastern Galicia and began writing Yiddish poems at a young age. His first poems were published in 1905. In 1909, his first collection of poems was published under the title װאָס איך זינג און...

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...

Today in Yiddishkayt… January 20 Yortsayt of Avrom Sutzkever, Poet and Partisan January 20 marks the second anniversary of the death of the great Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever, who died in Tel Aviv at the age of 96. He was born on July 15, 1913 in Smorgon (today Smarhoń, Belarus) about 60 miles from Vilna . He published his first work in the Jewish Scouts magazine and became a part of the writer and artist circle called יונג װילנע (Young Vilna). After the German invasion in the summer of 1941, Sutzkever and his wife Freydke used the guise of forced labor to help smuggle arms...