 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(March 2007) |
Poets who wrote, or write, much or all of their poetry in the Yiddish language include:
| | This article needs additional citations for verification .(March 2007) |
Poets who wrote, or write, much or all of their poetry in the Yiddish language include:
Hayim Nahman Bialik was a Jewish poet who wrote primarily in Hebrew and Yiddish. Bialik is considered a pioneer of modern Hebrew poetry, part of the vanguard of Jewish thinkers who gave voice to a new spirit of his time, and recognized today as Israel's national poet. Being a noted essayist and story-teller, Bialik also translated major works from European languages.
Yankev Shternberg was a Yiddish theater director, teacher of theater, playwright, avant-garde poet and short-story writer, best known for his theater work in Romania between the two world wars.
Osip Mikhailovich Lerner, also known as Y. Y. Lerner, was a 19th-century Russian Jewish intellectual, writer, and critic. Originally a maskil—a propagator of the Haskala, or "Jewish Enlightenment"—he became a pioneer in the fields of Yiddish theater and folklore, as well as literary criticism. In his later years, he converted to Christianity and wrote a book denouncing Jews.
H. Leivick was a Yiddish language writer, known for his 1921 "dramatic poem in eight scenes" The Golem. He also wrote many highly political, realistic plays, including Shop. He adopted the pen name of Leivick to avoid being confused with Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, another prominent Yiddish poet.
Yiddish literature encompasses all those belles-lettres written in Yiddish, the language of Ashkenazic Jewry which is related to Middle High German. The history of Yiddish, with its roots in central Europe and locus for centuries in Eastern Europe, is evident in its literature.
Moyshe-Leyb Halpern was a Yiddish-language modernist poet. He was born and raised in a traditional Jewish household in Zlotshev, Galicia and brought to Vienna at the age of 12 in 1898 to study commercial art. He then began writing modernist poetry in German. Upon returning to his hometown in 1907, he switched to writing in Yiddish. One of his best-known poems is a satire about his hometown.
Aaron Kramer was an American poet, translator, and social activist. A lifelong poet of political commitment, he wrote 26 volumes of poetry, three of prose, and ten of translations between 1938 and 1998. Kramer taught English at Dowling College in Oakdale, Long Island, New York.
Rajzel Żychlińsky was a Polish-born writer of poetry in Yiddish. She published seven collections over six decades. Her first two collections were published in Warsaw, Poland in 1936 and 1939, just prior to World War II. She survived the war by fleeing eastward to the Soviet Union, but many members of her immediate family were murdered in the Holocaust. Her postwar poetry, mostly written in the United States, was strongly influenced by these events.
Der Tog was a Yiddish-language daily newspaper published in New York City from 1914 until 1971. The offices of Der Tog were located on the Lower East Side, at 185 and 187 East Broadway.
Marcia Falk is a poet, liturgist, painter, and translator who has written several books of poetry and prayer.
Kadia Molodowsky was a Polish-American poet and writer in the Yiddish language, and a teacher of Yiddish and Hebrew. She published six collections of poetry during her lifetime, and was a widely recognized figure in Yiddish poetry during the twentieth century.
Fradl Shtok was a Jewish-American Yiddish-language poet and writer, who immigrated to the United States from Galicia, Austria-Hungary, at the age of 18 or 19. She is known as one of the first Yiddish poets to use the sonnet form; and her stories, which were less well received than her poems in her lifetime, have since been recognized as innovative for their exploration of subjectivity, and, in particular, for their depiction of Jewish female characters at odds with traditional roles and expectations.
The Itzik Manger Prize for outstanding contributions to Yiddish literature was established in 1968, shortly before Itzik Manger's death in 1969. Manger "was and remains one of the best-known twentieth-century Yiddish poets." The Prize has been described as the "most prestigious in Yiddish letters". Apparently no Manger Prizes have been awarded after 1999.
Jacob Adler, also known by his pen name B. Kovner, was a native of Austria-Hungary and a Galician Jew who became a Yiddish language writer, poet, and humorist in the United States.
Eliezer Greenberg was a Bessarabian-born Jewish-American Yiddish poet and literary critic.
Kathryn Ann Hellerstein is an American academic and scholar of Yiddish-language poetry, translation, and Jewish American literature. Specializing in Yiddish, she is currently a professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Ruth Meltzer Director of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She is known for her research focus on Yiddish women writers, notably Kadya Molodowsky, Malka Heifetz Tussman, and Celia Dropkin.
The Yiddish Philharmonic Chorus is a secular Jewish choir based in New York City. It was founded in 1923 by Lazar Weiner and Jacob Schaefer as the Freiheit Gezang Farein and was closely associated with Communist politics and the Morgen Freiheit newspaper; at its height in the 1920s and 1930s it had hundreds of members, many of whom were garment workers. After World War II, it was targeted by HUAC and was renamed the Jewish People’s Philharmonic Chorus in 1948. It adopted its current name in 2021.
Rukhl Fishman, also spelled Rokhl Fishman was an Israeli poet who wrote in Yiddish. In 1978, she received the Itzik Manger Prize.
Leib Naidus was a Yiddish poet and literary translator from the Russian Empire. He died young and his poems were not widely published during his lifetime, but they were printed in a number of volumes in the 1920s and gained some acclaim as having a unique modern voice in lyric and romantic styles.
