Kutno, Poland, 1880 — London, 1957

 

Novelist, playwright, essayist

 

He was born into a very orthodox family of ten children, was given a conservative, Talmudic education and spent his life rooted in the Jewish tradition. In Warsaw, he began to write in Hebrew, but under the influence of the writer Itzhok Lejb Peretz, he adopted Yiddish in his literary works. In 1914 he settled in the United States and began to write for the Yiddish newspaper Forverts, and  in 1920 became naturalized. He went back to Poland, but returned to the USA, where he published the greater part of his work.

 

He met Zweig during the era of the pacifist groups in Switzerland,  in 1917, and was the only openly Jewish writer among his circle of friends, the only one who, according to Zweig himself, went beyond the ghetto. His Christian trilogy (The Nazarene, Mary and The Apostle) caused a great commotion and polemic in the Jewish world of the 1930’s, in trying to bring together Judaism and Christianity by showing the affinities between the two religions. He greatly encouraged the translations to Yiddish of Zweig’s work, and became the translator to that language of his most Jewish work, The Buried Candelabra, although his name doesn’t appear on the title page. They corresponded frequently between 1928 and 1938. In January 1935 they travelled together from Nice to New York, where they met on several occasions.

 

He spent his last years in Bat Yam, a suburb of Tel Aviv, at the house which later became the Sholem Asch Museum.

 

Adress listed: Sky Meadow Drive, Stanford, Conn.  Tel. Stanford 3-8790