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Jacob Steinhardt (1887–1968) (Hebrew: יעקב שטיינהרדט) was a German-born Israeli painter and woodcut artist.
Contents [hide]
1 Biography
2 Artistic career
3 Collections
4 References
5 External links
Biography[edit]
Jacob Steinhardt was born in Zerkow, Germany (now Żerków, Poland). He attended the School of Art in Berlin in 1906, then studied painting with Lovis Corinth and engraving with Hermann Struck in 1907. From 1908 to 1910 he lived in Paris, where he associated with Henri Matisse and Théophile Steinlen, and in 1911 he was in Italy. When World War I broke out, he enlisted in the German Army, and served on the Eastern Front in Poland and Lithuania, and then in Macedonia. After the war, he returned to Berlin, and in 1922 married Minni Gumpert. They immigrated to Palestine in 1933, after he was harassed by the German police, dominated by the Nazis who recently came to power.
Steinhardt died in 1968. He is buried in Nahariya.
Artistic career[edit]
Jacob Steinhardt worked mainly in woodcuts depicting biblical and Jewish subjects. He participated in the Berlin Secession and founded the Pathetiker Group.[1] He was a member of the Bezalel school group. In 1934, Steinhardt opened an art school in Jerusalem. In 1948, he became Chairman of the Graphics Department at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. He served as director of the school in 1954-1957.
Collections[edit]
The Jewish Museum Berlin houses the largest Steinhardt collection in the world, including numerous graphic artworks and unpublished documents donated by Josefa Bar-On Steinhardt, the artist's daughter. The museum owns paintings, several hundred print graphics, and a collection of books illustrated by the artist.[2] It is also possible to discover some of his work at the Jewish Museum Frankfurt.
Jacob Steinhardt
Born: Zerkow, Posen, 1887 Studied: At the Kunstgewerbemuseum, Berlin. Also with Cornith, Struck, Matisse and Steinlen Immigrated: 1933 Taught graphic art at the Bezlel Art School and later became its Director Shows: Berlin and Paris, before 1933 Six one-man shows in Israeli museums, 1934-64 American museums, 1952-1963 San Paulo Biennale, 1955 Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1957 Venice Biennale, 1958 Awards: Prize of the International Institution for Liturgical Art, 1958 Gold Medal of Naples at International Exhibition "Arte Sacra", Trieste Contemporary Israel Art, Paris, National Museum of Modern Art, 1960. Steinhardt's highly original art is rooted in the values and symbols of Judaism. Much of his work echoes a religious vision: he has managed to depict in a plastic manner such prophits as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Jonah, and also Moses. He has also done with impressive simplicity scenes of Jewish life, its sorrows and joys. His style has varied from radical expressionism in his youth almost to conservatism in his later years. In all periods of his creative work, Steinhardt has been a master of portraiture; his likenesses are quintessential, sharp and acid. Steinhardt's early paintings and etchings were tempestuous, angry and sad; they expressed deep anguish. In form they were angular, and abounded in broken lines. After coming to this country, however, he turned more and more to the woodcut as a major means of expression, both in black and white, and in color. His forms became less angular, and became rounded, serene, and almost classic. Stienhardt's later paintings are mostly expressive, even emotional, landscapes. Ruins, mountains, and deserts are more conspicious in his work than valleys or the sea. His color scheme is primarily based on browns, yellows, and greys. He has often depicted Jerusalem, emphasizing its Hassidic qualities, its burning and mystic aspects. Moreover, has has always loved strange visions and dreams, and terrifying or apocalyptical sights. This is particularly true of his present period. Steinhardt is a master; his work reaches truly creative heigths, often by means of noble understatement. Steinhardt is most representative of the Central European group of the 1930s and 1940s. As an artist in Europe, he depicted the life of ghetto Jews in an intense, expressionistic style (e.g. "Sabbath Telk"). In Palestine before World War II, he broke with the established artists in that he was not afraid to show the old-style European Jew in the new land. Steinhardt also used Biblical themes and Israeli landscapes to express a prophetic message of hope that is squarely within the tradition of Judaism rejected by the earlier pioneers.
Jacob Steinhardt
Art Works Of
Jacob Steinhardt
Rosh Pina
The Prophet
Jeremiah
View All Art-Works
(1887-1968)
Born in Zerkow, Poland. studied at the Berlin Arts and Crafts School, painting with Levis Corinth and etching with Hermann Struck.
Steinhardt's work underwent tremendous changes in style and content during his life; his early work was related to the German expressionism, Ludwig Meidner and him founded the Pathetiker movement in 1912.
Steindardt joined the army in World War One; in tha period of his army service he felt more connected to the Jews he met in Lithuania, and he started to paint Jewish themes.
He immigrated to Israel in 1934 and settled in Jerusalem.
Thought he was best known for his woodcuts, Steinhardt worked on his themes in many media, and always thought himself primarily as a painter. His German roots were extremely strong. however, from the start, his Jewish identity played an important part in his life.
On fleeing Nazi Germany, Steindardt made a conscious choice to set aside his German artistic identity and to integrate into Jewish and Israeli art, becoming an influential teacher of the younger generation.
Steinhardt differed from many other Israeli artists in stressing the Jewish side of his personality more fully than they did, in his choice of biblical subjects which often reflected his sensitivity to the pain of others and in his constant stress on message of peace.
Isaac Leib Peretz (Polish: Icchok Lejbusz Perec, Hebrew: יצחק־לייבוש פרץ) (May 18, 1852 – 3 April 1915), also sometimes written Yitskhok Leybush Peretz, best known as I. L. Peretz, was a Yiddish language author and playwright from Poland. Payson R. Stevens, Charles M. Levine, and Sol Steinmetz count him with Mendele Mokher Seforim and Sholem Aleichem as one of the three great classical Yiddish writers. Sol Liptzin wrote: "Yitzkhok Leibush Peretz was the great awakener of Yiddish-speaking Jewry, and Sholom Aleichem its comforter... Peretz aroused in his readers the will for self-emancipation, the will for resistance..."
Peretz rejected cultural universalism, seeing the world as composed of different nations, each with its own character. Liptzin comments that "Every people is seen by him as a chosen people..."; he saw his role as a Jewish writer to express "Jewish ideals...grounded in Jewish tradition and Jewish history."
Unlike many other Maskilim, he greatly respected the Hasidic Jews for their mode of being in the world; at the same time, he understood that there was a need to make allowances for human frailty. His short stories such as "If Not Higher", "The Treasure", and "Beside the Dying" emphasize the importance of sincere piety rather than empty religiosity.
Contents [hide]
1 Biography
2 Work
3 References
3.1 Footnotes
3.2 Sources
4 External links
Biography[edit]
Left to right, Sholem Aleichem, Peretz, and Yacov Dinezon
Dinezon and Peretz
Born in the city of Zamość, Lublin Governorate, Congress Poland, and raised in an Orthodox Jewish home he gave his allegiance at age fifteen to the Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment. He began a deliberate plan of secular learning, reading books in Polish, Russian, German, and French. He planned to go to the theologically liberal Rabbinical school at Zhytomyr, but concern for his mother's feelings got him to stay on in Zamość. He married, through an arranged marriage, the daughter of Gabriel Judah Lichtenfeld, whom Liptzin describes as a "minor poet and philosopher".
He failed in an attempt to make a living distilling whiskey, but began to write Hebrew language poetry, songs, and tales, some of them written with his father-in-law ; this collaboration, however, did not prevent his divorce in 1878, after which he promptly remarried (his second wife was Helena Ringelheim). At about the same time, he passed the examination to become a lawyer, a profession which he successfully pursued for the next decade, until in 1889 his license was revoked by the Imperial Russian authorities, on the basis of suspicion of Polish nationalist feelings. From then on he lived in Warsaw, where his income came largely from a job in the small bureaucracy of the city's Jewish community. There he founded Hazomir (The Nightingale), which became the cultural centre of pre-World War I Yiddish Warsaw.
His first Yiddish work appeared in 1888, notably the long ballad Monish, which appeared that year in the landmark anthology Folksbibliotek ("People's Library"), edited by Sholom Aleichem. This ballad tells the story of an ascetic young man, Monish, who unsuccessfully resists the temptress Lilith.
A writer of social criticism, sympathetic to the labor movement, he wrote stories, folk tales and plays. Liptzin characterizes him as both a realist and a romanticist, who "delved into irrational layers of the soul"... ; "an optimist who believed in the inevitability of progress through enlightenment", and who, at times, expressed this optimism through "visions of Messianicpossibilities". Still, while most Jewish intellectuals were unrestrained in their support of the Russian Revolution of 1905, Peretz's view was more reserved, focusing more on the pogroms that took place within the Revolution, and concerned that the Revolution's universalist ideals would leave little space for Jewish non-conformism.
Peretz assisted other Yiddish writers in publishing their work, including Der Nister[1] and Lamed Shapiro.
Much as Jacob Gordin influenced Yiddish theater in New York City in a more serious direction, so did Peretz in Eastern Europe. Israil Bercovici sees Peretz's works for the stage as a synthesis of Gordin and of the more traditional and melodramatic Abraham Goldfaden, an opinion which Peretz himself apparently would not have rejected: "The critics", he wrote, "the worst of them thought that M.M. Seforim was my model. This is not true. My teacher was Abraham Goldfaden."
Some of Peretz's most important works are Oyb Nisht Nokh Hekher ("If not Higher") and the short story "Bontshe Shvayg" ("Bontsche the Silent"). "Bontsche" is the story of an extremely meek and modest man, downtrodden on earth but exalted in heaven for his modesty, who, offered any heavenly reward, chooses one as modest as the way he had lived. While the story can be read as praise of this meekness, there is also an ambiguity in the ending, which can be read as showing contempt for someone who cannot even imagine receiving more.
Peretz's 1907 play A Night in the Old Marketplace has been adapted into a multimedia theatrical presentation, with music by Frank London and book and lyrics by Glen Berger, slated to open in 2007; the CD is already on sale. Set in a Jewish shtetl, the comedy presents the philosophical and theological questions of living and dying, in Peretz's typical style.
Peretz died in the city of Warsaw, Congress Poland, in 1915. There are streets in in Warsaw, in Zamość and in Wrocław (also a square) named after him (ulica Icchaka Lejba Pereca in Polish). He was buried at the Okopowa Street Jewish Cemetery with a huge crowd, about 100 000 strong,[2] attending the burial ceremony.
Peretz Square in Lower Manhattan (New York City, USA), which marks the spot where Houston Street, First Avenue, and First Street meet, is named after him. It was dedicated on November 23, 1952.[3]
The American journalist Martin Peretz is one of his descendants.[4] The French author Georges Perec was a distant relative.[5] Peretz has other living descendants in his brother's line: physicians, teachers, attorneys, performers, all in the Tri-state area of New York City.
There are streets named after him in Israel in the following cities:
Tel Aviv
Hod Hasharon
Bat Yam
Haifa
Kiryat Yam
Holon
Givat Shmuel
Peretz Square in Lower Manhattan
Warsaw, Poland
Work[edit]
Peretz wrote in both Hebrew and Yiddish. His work The Magician, found inspiration in the folklore of Hasidic Judaism. The story focuses around Elijah, who anonymously visits a poor couple and helps to make them rich. The 1917 edition was illustrated by Marc Chagall. Chagall did not know Peretz and did not read Peretz's work until he was commissioned to create the drawings.[6]
References[edit]
Footnotes[edit]
Jump up^ Der Nister
Jump up^ [1]
Jump up^ PERETZ SQUARE - Historical Sign
Jump up^ The Jewish History Channel: SERIES Sephard in Ashkenaz and Ashkenaz in Sephard. Of Yiddish and American writers
Jump up^ Bellos, David. Georges Perec: A life in words. David R. Godine, 1993, p. 10.
Jump up^ "The Magician". World Digital Library. 1917. Retrieved 2013-09-30.
Sources[edit]
Bercovici, Israil, O sută de ani de teatru evreiesc în România ("One hundred years of Yiddish/Jewish theater in Romania"), 2nd Romanian-language edition, revised and augmented by Constantin Măciucă. Editura Integral (an imprint of Editurile Universala), Bucharest (1998). ISBN 973-98272-2-5. p. 116.
Liptzin, Sol, A History of Yiddish Literature, Jonathan David Publishers, Middle Village, NY, 1972, ISBN 0-8246-0124-6. Page 56 et seq.
Stevens, Payson R.; Levine, Charles M.; and Steinmetz, Sol The contributions of I.L. Peretz to Yiddish literature, 2002, on MyJewishLearning.com.
My Jewish Learning: I.L. Peretz at myjewishlearning. Peretz, Yitskhok Leybush
ContentsHide
At the Crossroad of Languages
Forging a Modern Literature
In Service of Cultural Autonomy
Suggested Reading
Author
(1852–1915), Yiddish and Hebrew poet, writer, essayist, dramatist, and cultural figurehead. Yitskhok Leybush Peretz was born to a prominent family in Zamość, a multiethnic Polish city ruled by Russia during his lifetime, and a stronghold of Jewish Enlightenment. Peretz’s father, Yude, was a merchant; his mother Rivke, who shared the running of their shop, bore nine children of whom Leybush, the second, was the oldest of three who survived into adulthood.
A precocious child, Peretz was given an accelerated, largely private education in Talmud and commentaries; from tutors, he acquired Hebrew and Russian and a reading knowledge of German and Polish. He later taught himself French. Peretz credited his parents with setting him an example of Jewish moral behavior. His unsystematic reading as an adolescent included Maimonides, Jewish mysticism, and Hebrew Enlightenment literature. He described his adolescent discovery of European literature, law, and social thought as entry into “their” besmedresh, the study house of the gentiles.
Cover of a volume from the set Ale verk fun Y. L. Perets (Collected Works of Y. L. Peretz), published in Vilna by Boris Kletskin in the 1920s. (YIVO)
In 1870, Peretz’s parents arranged his marriage to Sarah, daughter of the maskil Gavriel Yehudah Lichtenfeld, with whom Peretz copublished his first book of Hebrew poetry, Sipurim be-shir ve-shirim shonim (Stories in Verse and Selected Poems), in 1877. The couple lived briefly in Grabow, Apt [Opatów], and Tsoyzmir [Sandomierz], where Peretz tried his hand at various business ventures. The marriage was dissolved after five years, and Peretz took charge of their son Lucjan. Peretz’s second, happier, though childless, marriage to Helena Ringelheim, daughter of a well-to do merchant, prompted him to seek a profession.
After a two-year stay in Warsaw from 1876 to 1877, where he tutored in Hebrew, Peretz returned to Zamość to study independently for the attorney’s exam. He became a “private lawyer” (as opposed to those entitled to plead in Russian courts) and ran a thriving legal practice for the next decade, representing prominent Polish and Jewish clients. He was active in civic affairs, cofounded the volunteer fire department, helped establish a modern Jewish secondary school, and lectured in a workers’ evening school. In 1887, he was stripped of his license for allegedly promoting Polish nationalism and socialism. Unable to resume his legal practice, he moved to Warsaw the following year.
Naḥum Sokolow recommended Peretz to join him on a statistical survey of Polish Jews that was sponsored by philanthropist Jan Bloch to counteract allegations of Jewish parasitism. Peretz’s fictionalized “Bilder fun a provints-rayze in tomashover poviat um 1890 yor” (Impressions of a Journey through the Tomaszów Region in 1890; 1891) remains the only published testimony to that project. In 1891, Peretz became a functionary of the Warsaw Jewish community council, the gmine,assigned to the department of burials.
For the rest of his life, Peretz divided his days between his bureaucratic job and writing, and kept regular visiting hours in his home for writers and cultural activists. He skirted tsarist censorship in a series of Yiddish publications that he edited: the anthologies Di yudishe bibliotek (The Jewish Library; 3 vols., 1891–1895) and Literatur un lebn (Literature and Life; 1895); the Yontev bletlekh (Holiday Issues; 1894–1896), an irregular periodical that camouflaged its social reformist intentions as Jewish holiday material; and a single issue of the Hebrew Ha-Ḥets (The Arrow; 1894). Himself the major contributor, Peretz used these publications to promote younger Yiddish and Hebrew writers.
In the absence of Jewish cultural institutions, Peretz turned each of his apartments, first on Ceglana Street, then Jerozolimskie Street, into a literary hub, sparking the careers of writers Sholem Asch, S. An-ski, Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister (Pinkhas Kaganovitch), Alter-Sholem Kacyzne, Hersh Dovid Nomberg, Yoysef Opatoshu, Dovid Pinski, Avrom Reyzen, Lamed Shapiro, Itshe Meyer Vaysenberg (Weissenberg), Yehoyesh (Solomon Bloomgarden), and many others. Yekhiel Yeshaye Trunk typically recalled that his first approach to Peretz’s apartment was “the most decisive walk in [his] life,” and it still made his heart beat excitedly whenever he retraced that route three decades later.
At the Crossroad of Languages
Peretz differed from Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh (Mendele Moykher-Sforim) and Sholem Aleichem—who together form the “triumvirate of Yiddish classic masters”—in his primary relation to Polish rather than Russian coterritorial culture. Raised in the sphere of Polish, Peretz modeled his idea of Jewish cultural renaissance on Poland’s struggle for independence, which compensated for the Poles’ political dependency by promoting national language and culture. At age 22, he composed a collection of Polish verses. Though he later dismissed these poems as an unfortunate “international moment” (Peretz, Briv un redes [1944], p. 321), he remained alert to developments in Polish literature.
The example of Polish ethnographers inspired Peretz to encourage the collection of Yiddish folklore and its integration into contemporary art, music, and literature. He undertook and encouraged translation of Polish positivist writers. Peretz also championed the ideal of a culturally autonomous Polish Jewry against proponents of assimilation and those who called for emigration, including to Palestine. Although he became increasingly disillusioned with Polish politics at the turn of the century, he upheld doikayt—the continued presence of Jews in Poland—while polemicizing vigorously against antisemitism.
A decade after Sipurim be-shir, Peretz resumed publishing in Hebrew and thereafter alternated between Hebrew and Yiddish, often rewriting the same or versions of the same work in both languages. Dissatisfied with the hard rationalism of the Haskalah, he developed a more frankly personal expressive style. In the series of verses Manginat ha-zeman (The Melody of the Epoch; 1887), the poet registers shifting states of mind as he reflects on the moral strengths and liabilities of his people. The confessional poems of a lover and artist in the small Hebrew collection Ha-‘Ugav(The Harp; 1894) were attacked by David Frishman on charges of plagiarism and hailed by Yosef Klausner for bringing fresh themes into Hebrew verse.
(Left to right) Yankev Dinezon, Y. L. Peretz, and Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport (S. An-ski), Poland, ca. 1910. (YIVO)
Controversy similarly greeted his formal debut in Yiddish in the first volume of Sholem Aleichem’s Di yidishe folks-bibliotek (1888), with “Monish,” a modern ballad about a model Jewish youth who is coaxed by a Christian siren into betraying his religion, family, and God. Knowing nothing of modern Yiddish writing when he took up the language, Peretz said he wrote to please himself and equally sophisticated readers. Critics Simon Dubnow in Voskhod (1889) and Y. H. Ravnitski in Ha-Melits (1889), ignoring the poem’s self-referential ironies, deemed it incomprehensible, a judgment that later often resurfaced in relation to Peretz’s most innovative works. Among his early admirers, Yankev Dinezon hailed Peretz as the “new sun rising on a clear morning after a terrible dark night” (Letter to Sholem Aleichem, 26 May 1889). On the strength of this judgment, Dineson became Peretz’s literary manager, and reissued his first short stories in a separate publication, Bekante bilder (Familiar Images; 1890).
While modern scholars try to identify differences between Peretz’s fiction in Hebrew and Yiddish, their author seemed to regard it as thematically interchangeable, distinguished largely by the artistic opportunities of the two languages. His early stories provided a new cultural vocabulary for an audience accustomed to grappling with moral dilemmas. He dramatized tensions between Jew and gentile, and demonstrated psychological and social conflicts; among his themes was the argument over Western versus Jewish ideals of beauty, illustrated in “Venus and Shulamith” (1889). He also wrote the monologue of an eponymous “Mad Talmudist” (1890) who is torn between physical, spiritual, and intellectual urges; a critique of an unsavory husband who becomes a public benefactor at his wife’s expense (“Mendl Braines”; 1891); and a portrayal of tense companionship between Jewish and Polish traveling companions (“In a Post-chaise”; 1891). Peretz used a legal framework for a number of stories, contrasting society’s expectation of justice with the passions or complicating circumstances that mitigate against it.
Forging a Modern Literature
With the rise of the Jewish labor and socialist movements, Peretz’s writing entered what Ayzik Rosenzweig defined as his “radical phase” from 1893 to 1899. In stories, articles, and comic fables, Peretz broadened the maskilic satire of religious hypocrisy to include attacks on economic exploitation and portrayals of proletarian life. He aired the plight of Jewish women thwarted in their personal ambitions, and the social conventions that required their subservience. Labor organizers used stories such as “Bontshe shvayg” (Bontshe the Silent; 1894) the countermyth of a suffering saint, to teach class consciousness and the need for political organization. During these years, Peretz temporarily subordinated the ideal of national unity to that of class conflict. He took special offense at Ahad Ha-Am’s idea of a “spiritual center” in the land of Israel, asking derisively whether it was possible to have an artificial center far away from the life of the people (Ha-Ḥets; 1894).
At the time of his arrest and three-month imprisonment in 1899 in connection with his socialist activities, Peretz had already balked at the repressive influence of materialist ideology on personal and national self-expression. He opened a new vein of neoromantic fiction on national and heroic themes. Though he lacked first-hand knowledge of Hasidism, he contributed to the Zionist periodical Der yud a series of stories on Hasidic motifs later collected under the rubric Khsidish (In the Hasidic Manner) that identified democratic and creative impulses in the religious idealism of charismatic rabbis. Peretz anticipated Martin Buber in freeing Hasidism from its earlier image as superstitious deception and in highlighting its psychological, social, and spiritual strengths. Along similar lines, he adapted traditional folk motifs to modern tales “in the folk manner,” which became among his best-known works and staples of the modern Jewish school movement. These tales explore core values of Jewish life, distinctions between true and fake piety, wisdom and sophistry, self-promotion and self-sacrifice.
Bay nakht afn altn mark (At Night at the Old Market). Isaak Rabichev, Moscow, 1925. Pen and India ink on paper. Poster design for a GOSET production of the play by Y. L. Peretz. (Hillel Kazovsky)
A latecomer to playwriting, Peretz took an increasingly active role in Jewish theater once the tsarist ban on Yiddish performance was relaxed in 1905. In 1903, he published in Hebrew Ḥurban bet tsadik (Ruin of the Tsadik’s House), the first version of a play that pits the older ideals of a Jewish moral community against the younger generation’s bid for individual freedoms. From this grew the Yiddish verse drama Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain), in which a rabbi’s failed attempt to force the Redemption ushers in a downward spiral of religious authority through three generations of declining faith. Yet more ambitious in conception and scale, “Bay nakht afn altn mark” (A Night in the Old Marketplace; 1907) brings together more than 100 characters, living and dead, from every stratum of Jewish society in a phantasmagoric review of Jewish life in Poland. Never produced in Peretz’s lifetime, it was singled out by its English translator Hillel Halkin as “one of the most extraordinary stage plays I had ever come across” (The I. L. Peretz Reader [2002], p. 438). Peretz set up a theater studio to produce his own and others’ work and tried to establish a national organization for Yiddish theater in Russia. He attempted to raise the level of Yiddish theater performance through his theater reviews and essays.
In Service of Cultural Autonomy
Peretz dominated the Czernowitz Conference of 1908, convened to raise the national status of Yiddish. Boosting the idea of multinational countries, he defended the people (dos folk) over the state, and distinctive national cultures over political boundaries. He helped stave off a radical resolution to declare Yiddish (as opposed to Hebrew) “the” Jewish national language, but hailed the creativity of the Jewish masses whose language was Yiddish. He warned that a deracinated Yiddish could itself become a means of assimilation unless it drew on traditional sources. In attempts to develop a holistic Jewish culture, he undertook Yiddish translations of the biblical Megilot (scrolls), organized the Hazomir society in Warsaw for the performance and study of Jewish music, and lectured to adults on Jewish history and heritage at the People’s University, which he had helped to found. At the outbreak of World War I, Peretz threw himself into relief work. He helped establish a Jewish orphanage and wrote poems for children, one of which lay unfinished when he died of a heart attack on ḥol ha-mo‘ed (intermediate days of) Passover (3 April). His memoirs, which he began serializing in 1913, were interrupted at the point of his first marriage.
More than any other Jewish intellectual, Peretz expressed and represented the hope that Jewish cultural leaders could take over from rabbis the function of inspirational authority in a secular age. About 100,000 people attended his funeral. Numerous elegies and tribute volumes were published in his memory; schools and organizations were named for him wherever Polish Jews settled. His tombstone in the Warsaw Jewish cemetery, Ohel Peretz, survived the Nazi occupation. Based on several such real events, an evening devoted to Peretz figures in John Hersey’s novel The Wall(1950) as a symbol of spiritual resistance in the Warsaw ghetto.
Suggested Reading
Adam Kopciowski, “Z dziejów rodziny Pereców w Zamosciu [The Peretz Family in Zamocz],” in Ortodoksja, emancypacja, asymilacja, ed. Konrad Zieliński and Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, pp. 159–179 (Lublin, Pol., 2003); Nachman Mayzel (Meisel), Yitskhok Leybush Perets un zayn dor shrayber (New York, [1951]); Samuel (Shmuel) Niger, Y. L. Perets: Zayn lebn (Buenos Aires, 1952); David G. Roskies, “I. L. Peretz,” in A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling, pp. 99–146 (Cambridge, Mass., 1995); Chone Shmeruk, Peretses yiesh-vizye (New York, 1971); Ruth R. Wisse, I. L. Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Seattle, 1991).
Peretz, in full Isaac Leib Peretz, also spelled Yitskhak Leybush Perets, Leib also spelled Loeb or Löb (born May 18, 1852, Zamość, Poland, Russian Empire—died April 3, 1915, Warsaw) prolific writer of poems, short stories, drama, humorous sketches, and satire who was instrumental in raising the standard of Yiddish literature to a high level.
I.L. Peretz.
Peretz began writing in Hebrew but soon turned to Yiddish. For his tales, he drew material from the lives of impoverished Jews of eastern Europe. Critical of their humility and resignation, he urged them to consider their temporal needs while retaining the spiritual grandeur for which he esteemed them. Influenced by Polish Neoromantic and Symbolist writings, Peretz lent new expressive force to the Yiddish language in numerous stories collected in such volumes as Bakante bilder (1890; “Familiar Scenes”), Khasidish (1907; “Hasidic”), and Folkstimlekhe geshikhtn (1908; “Folktales”). In his drama Die goldene keyt (1909; “The Golden Chain”), Peretz stressed the timeless chain of Jewish culture.
To encourage Jews toward a wider knowledge of secular subjects, Peretz for several years wrote articles on physics, chemistry, economics, and other subjects for Di yudishe bibliotek (1891–95; “The Jewish Library”), which he also edited. Among his other nonfictional works are Bilder fun a provints-rayze (1891; “Scenes from a Journey Through the Provinces”), about Polish small-town life, and Mayne zikhroynes (1913–14; “My Memoirs”).
Peretz effectively ushered Yiddish literature into the modern era by exposing it to contemporary trends in western European art and literature. In his stories he viewed Hasidic material obliquely from the standpoint of a secular literary intellect, and with this unique perspective the stories became the vehicle for an elegiac contemplation of traditional Jewish values.
The Peretz home in Warsaw was a gathering place for young Jewish writers, who called him the “father of modern Yiddish literature.” During the last 10 years of his life, Peretz became the recognized leader of the Yiddishist movement, whose aim—in opposition to the Zionists—was to create a complete cultural and national life for Jewry within the Diaspora with Yiddish as its language. He played an important moderating role as deputy chairman at the Yiddish Conference that assembled in 1908 at Czernowitz, Austria-Hungary (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine), to promote the status of the language and its culture. ebay3787