1923 Jewish HAND SIGNED Hebrew POEM BOOK Autograph ZALMAN SHNEUR Yiddish JUDAICA
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1923 Jewish HAND SIGNED Hebrew POEM BOOK Autograph ZALMAN SHNEUR Yiddish JUDAICA:
$145.00
DESCRIPTION : Up for sale is an extremely rare copy of the Jewish-Hebrew POEM and SONG BOOK named \"CHEZYONOT\" ( VISIONS or SPECTACLES ) which is HAND SIGNED (Autographed ) and INSCRIBED by the great PROFILIC Hebrew and YIDDISH writer and poet of Russian origin ZALMAN SHNEUR ( Also SHNEOUR ). The book was published in 1923 ( Dated ) in Berlin by \"HASEFER\" . SHNEUR has SIGNED and INSCRIBED the book with a red fountain pen and dated and located it \"BERLIN 1923 ( Tarpa\'d )\" . ORIGINAL luxurious illustrated cloth HC. Gilt and silvered headings. Around 8 x 6\". Around 314 pp. Excellent condition . Tightly bound. Entirely clean.( Plslook at scan for accurate AS IS images )Book will be sent inside aprotective envelope .
PAYMENTS : Payment method accepted : Paypal .SHIPPMENT : Shipp worldwide via registered airmail is $ 18 . Will be sent inside a protective rigid envelope . Will be sent within3-5 days after payment . Kindly note that duration of Int\'l registered airmail is around 14 days.
Zalman Shneur (Hebrew: זלמן שניאור) (born 1887; died 20 February 1959) was a prolific bilingual Yiddish and Hebrew poet and writer. Contents 1 Biography2 Awards3 See also4 References Biography Shneur was born in Shklov (Škłoŭ) in Belarus (then part of the Russian Empire) in 1887. His parents were Isaac Zalkind and Feiga Sussman. At age 13, he left for Odessa, the center of literature and Zionism during this time. Shneur moved to Warsaw in 1902, and was hired by a successful publishing house. He then moved to Vilnius in 1904, where he began to publish his first book and a collection of stories. These poems were extremely successful, and many editions were published. In 1907, Shneur moved to Paris to study Natural Sciences, Philosophy, and Literature, at the Sorbonne. He traveled throughout Europe from 1908 to 1913, and even visited North Africa. At the start of World War I Zalman Shneur was in Berlin. During the years of the war, he worked in a hospital and studied at the University of Berlin. Shneur returned to Paris in 1923. He stayed there until 1940, when Hitler\'s troops invaded France. Shneur then fled to Spain, and from there he went to New York in 1941. He died in 1959 in New York.[1] Awards In 1951, Shneur was awarded the Bialik Prize for Literature.[2]In 1955, he was awarded the Israel Prize for literature.[3] · Zalman Schneur, well-known Hebrew and Yiddish writer who has made his home in Paris for many years, is seriously ill of diabetes. He has been transferred from a Paris hospital to a sanatorium at Nice, France. · Schneur, who is 47 years old, was born in Russia, a descendant of a Chassidic family. He began his literary work in Odessa. Since then he has written a number of books and frequently contributed to Yiddish and Hebrew newspapers and journals. Shneour, Zalman Contents Hide Suggested ReadingAuthor (1886–1959), Hebrew and Yiddish poet and novelist. A scion of the Shneerson dynasty that has led the Lubavitch Hasidic movement since its inception, Zalman (Zalkind) Shneour was born to a middle-class, somewhat traditional family in the Belorussian town of Shklov, a center of Jewish learning, of Lubavitch Hasidism, and of the Haskalah. His childhood (which he colorfully evoked in his novella cycle Shklover yidn [Jews of Shklov; 1929]) was not a happy one. A recipient of a traditional heder education with the addition of some tutoring in modern secular studies (including Russian and modern Hebrew), Shneour became, from a very early age, an avid reader of Hebrew literature. This was definitely not encouraged by his parents, who wished to see him turn his attention to a practical career in commerce. When Shneour was 12, his father took him to Warsaw for Naḥum Sokolow, editor of the daily newspaper Ha-Tsefirah, to decide whether it was realistic to allow Shneour to indulge in writing. The meeting with Sokolow went badly, and the father and son returned home, each more determined than ever to oppose the will of the other. More than a year later, young Shneour abandoned his home and went to Odessa, then the capital of Zionist and Hebrew literary activity. He was received with warmth and compassion by Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik, who became the benevolent father figure in Shneour’s life. In 1902, Shneour left for Warsaw and found work in the editorial office of the Hebrew children’s weekly ‘Olam katan, in which his first poems for children were printed. In that same year, he published his first “adult” Hebrew and Yiddish poems in different Warsaw publications. In 1904, he moved to Vilna, where he worked for the Hebrew periodical Ha-Zeman (in which he published poems and prose, including his first extended novella, Mavet [Death], written in the form of the diary of a suicide). Falling in love with the old town (which he was later to commemorate in a famous ode) and its young women, he spent the happiest two years of his youth there, at the end of which time he was already a well-known member of the Hebrew poetic “Pleiade” (the group of young poets influenced by Bialik). In 1906, his first collection of Hebrew poems, ‘Im sheki‘at ha-ḥamah (At Sunset), was published by Tushiyah, then a bustling publishing house that monopolized contemporary “young” Hebrew writing. The book, generally well received, elicited the highest public praise from Bialik, ensuring Shneour’s poetic status as the most prominent and promising poet among his contemporaries. From La-Sevivon (To the Dreydl), by Zalman Shneour (Frankfurt, Moscow, Odessa: Omanut, 1922). Illustration by Ḥavurat Tsayarim be-Odes (Group of Artists in Odessa). This Hebrew children\'s book was prepared in Odessa in 1918-1921, but issued in Frankfurt a year later, after the repression of Hebrew culture in the Soviet Union made its publication there impossible. It is believed to have been illustrated by one or more members of a group of four students from the Odessa Art Academy, who may have needed to remain anonymous for fear of persecution. (Gross Family Collection) Emboldened, Shneour decided to leave
Eastern Europe to acquire a modern literary and scientific education in Western universities. He intermittently studied literature, philosophy, and natural sciences in Switzerland (Bern and Geneva) and in Paris. At the same time, he constantly enlarged the conceptual and generic format of his poetry. If before 1906 he had written mainly relatively short lyrical poems of mood and landscape, now he invested himself in comprehensive cycles of poems and particularly in extensive rhapsodic sequences in which mood and landscape form a backdrop for philosophical rumination (evincing the poet’s penchant for somewhat popularized Nietzschean and vitalist concepts) as well as for lengthy rhetorical arguments. Shneour’s poem “‘Im tselile ha-mandolina” (To the Sound of the Mandolin; 1912), offering a Nietzschean view of the nihilist cultural present (“God’s demise”) as well as of the tragic Jewish exilic state, was enthusiastically received as a masterpiece. Similarly celebrated was the vast symbolist sequence Be-Harim (In the Mountains; 1908–1913), a philosophical quest poem of a poet wanderer who seeks the meaning of life and art in the Swiss Alps. Shneour worked for five years on this lyrical epic, the completion of which made possible the publication of a major collection of poems, originally under the title Shirim u-fo’emot (Lyrical and Narrative Poems; 1914), but subsequently better known by the title Gesharim (Bridges). The publication in 1913 of the poem “Yeme ha-benayim mitkarvim” (The Dark Ages Draw Nigh), a rhetorical tour de force in which the poet prophesied, against the background of the Beilis
blood libel trial, the approaching rebrutalization of European civilization and reemergence of a visceral, “medieval” antisemitism, enhanced Shneour’s poetic stature by adding to his other qualities that of a prophet, a trait that the Bialikian poet–prophet model demanded from a Hebrew poet of genius. During the decade before World War I, Shneour was also prolific as the author of Hebrew and Yiddish psychological and naturalistic prose fiction. He also wrote and published Yiddish poems (among them the well-known “Margaritkelekh” [Little Daisies], which gained wide popularity as a folk song). When World War I broke out, Shneour was in Berlin, studying medicine. Carrying a Russian passport, he was now subject to many restrictions. He was forced to discontinue his studies and suffered hardships until he managed (in 1919) to leave Germany (via Copenhagen) and reach the United States. His ties with American and European Yiddish newspapers restored, Shneour went back to Germany, but after giving up on medicine, he joined the Russian Jewish businessman and cultural entrepreneur Shelomoh Zaltsman in establishing a Hebrew publishing house. The enterprise then published his collected Hebrew writings from the years 1900 to 1923 in three deluxe volumes: Gesharim (1922; a new edition of the 1914 poetry collection), Ba-Metsar (In Extremis; 1923; prose fiction), and Ḥezyonot (Visions; 1924)—the latter an extensive collection of poetry from the years 1913–1923, including well-known poems such as “Yeme ha-benayim mitkarvim,” “Vilna,” “Spartacus,” and the rhetorical pièce de résistance “Mi-Shire ha-goral” (Poems of Destiny), perhaps Shneour’s most incisive exploration of the fate of the artist as a Nietzschean superman. This new collection of poems was hailed by the established critics as representing a fully mature poet. However, Shneour’s role as a major Hebrew literary figure was, at this point, all but played out. He felt the antagonism of a young literary generation even before he attempted in 1925 to find a place for himself and his family in Palestine. Yet there, he was bitterly disappointed with his reception and with the offers the local literary establishment and Zionist officialdom could make in order to facilitate his settling down in Tel Aviv. He returned to Paris, to where he had moved from Berlin a year earlier, and made France his home for 17 years. The change in his literary career manifested itself in a dual shift of emphasis: from Hebrew to Yiddish and from poetry to prose fiction. Outwardly, this did not involve a drastic reconstruction of the author’s literary personality, since Shneour had from the onset of his career written much fiction in both languages. Also, he would continue writing Hebrew poetry (indeed, a third major collection appeared in Tel Aviv in 1933, titled Pirke ya‘ar [Forest Chapters]; it included the author’s best lyrical poems) as well as rewriting in Hebrew some of his major Yiddish novels. However, the implications of the dual shift were far-reaching. From Zalman Shneour in Warsaw to Abraham Cahan in New York, 28 November 1928. Shneour and his wife and child are visiting her father, and therefore he apologizes for delays this may cause in his delivery of installments of stories that Cahan is publishing serially in the American Yiddish newspaper Forverts: \"The Polish post is not as punctual as the French post.\" He complains that Cahan\'s refusal to allow the Canadian Yiddish newspaper Der keneder odler to reprint his work has deprived him of income, and he wants Cahan to get the Forverts to make it up to him with a bigger monthly fee for the \"4 novels that I have printed week in and week out.\" He notes that booksellers from all over Europe and America have written to him asking him to publish the novels in book form. Based on this, he is sure that a print run of 5,000–6,000 would sell out, at least 2,000 in Warsaw alone. He knows that the Forverts doesn\'t publish books but he wonders if they might make an exception this time. He awaits the next volume of Cahan\'s published memoirs and compares the latter favorably to a memoir by Shmerl Levin that he has recently read. He also alludes to the fact that Cahan is a \"martyr\" who has put aside his fiction writing for the good of \"his party.\" Yiddish. Hebrew letterhead: Z. Shneour. RG 1139, Abraham Cahan Papers, F135. (YIVO) In Paris in the summer of 1927, Shneour met with Abe Cahan, the dictatorial editor of the Forverts, the most widely circulated Yiddish newspaper in America. Cahan insisted on publishing (in weekly installments) artistic fiction of quality and was able to pay handsome salaries to writers whose narrative art appealed to him and at the same time was accessible to a wide readership. Shneour presented him with a series of brilliantly written tales and vignettes focusing on the life of a middle-class Jewish family in Shklov of the 1890s—a slightly camou
Flaged sequence of autobiographical pieces. Cahan’s reaction was enthusiastic. Not only were the stories poignant, funny, and well crafted, but they also responded to a growing cultural need, on the part of the already acculturated and relatively secure Jewish immigrants in the West, to look “homeward” to their native East European towns and hamlets, now changed and unreachable because of wars and revolutions, with bittersweet nostalgia. The success of the Shklov sequence, as it was published in weekly installments for almost a year in the Forverts (as well as in Moment, the popular Warsaw newspaper), was spectacular. Readers of the newspapers read the installments to their families as part of Sabbath relaxation. The author, who also published the stories in two volumes, Shklover yidn (1929) and Feter Zhome (Uncle Zhome; 1930; both texts went into many editions), became the most popular Yiddish fiction writer (alongside Sholem Asch) of the time, and could afford a high standard of living in his elegant villa near Paris. More important, he discovered that the impressions of life in the hometown he had left with no regret as a teenager came back now, engulfing his memory and releasing in him an unprecedented creative energy. He turned from the constrained world of middle-class Shklov to the simpler and more emotionally dynamic of one of the town’s ameratsim (ignoramuses), artisans, and workers, people of great appetites and much physical prowess and courage, and produced a vast epic with the figure of the brave teamster Noyekh Pandre at its center (Noyekh Pandre was eventually published in five volumes; 1938–1939). From there Shneour turned to Shklov, Saint Petersburg, and Paris of the beginning of the nineteenth century in an extensive, intricately plotted historical novel (Keyser un rebe [Emperor and Rabbi], with a book-form edition in five volumes; 1944–1952), in which he attempted to bring together the history of the nascent Lubavitch Hasidic movement and its founder, Reb Shneur Zalman of Liady, the career of Napoleon from soldier of the French Revolution to France’s emperor, and the secret incestuous history of a respected family of Jewish Shklov’s upper crust. More Shklov-centered novels, such as Der mamzer (The Bastard; 1957) followed. In essence, Shneour dedicated the three last decades of his life to a growing cycle of Shklov epics that absorbed the best part of his literary energy, although he also kept writing poetry in both Yiddish and Hebrew. World War II trapped Shneour and his family in occupied France. After more than a year in hiding, they managed to slip out of the country, arriving in New York in 1941. Thanks to his ties with the Forverts, the writer managed to settle down in relative comfort, continuing the interrupted publication of his Yiddish fiction. He stayed in the United States until the early 1950s when he decided to relocate to Israel, which he had visited in 1949. He lived there intermittently throughout the last decade of his life. Greatly inspired by Israel’s triumphs, Shneour nevertheless experienced much disillusionment and disappointment, facing an Israeli culture with readers and a literary establishment that had little use for him. He prepared a 10-volume edition of his Hebrew works, issued between 1957 and 1960. He died in New York in 1959. A year later, his remains were buried in Tel Aviv not far from those of Bialik and Sha’ul Tchernichowsky. A street was named after Shneour in the city by which, for much of his life, he had felt rejected. Historically, Shneour’s contribution to the growth of post-Bialikian Hebrew poetry during the first two decades of the twentieth century consists of his contributions to the following three developments. The first was the refashioning of the genre of the poema, a very central genre in Hebrew poetry that Shneour wrenched out of its linear narrative matrix and, in the spirit of the then-current symbolism, reconstructed as a vast lyrical flow of fantasy, description, philosophical cogitation, and rhetorical harangue—all held together by theme, rhythm, and musical pattern rather than by a story line. The second development was prosodic and stylistic. The third was thematic and ideational. Shneour extracted from the “spirit” of the so-called Hebrew national renaissance the instinctual and liofferinous principles that were inherent in it and took them as far as the culture of his time would allow. His was a rebellious poetry in which intellectualism and raw instinct went hand in hand in their opposition to sentimentalism and bourgeois decorum. This often led Shneour to a combination of sensuous indulgence and intellectual pessimism that was informed by the tenets of European decadence. On another level, if we seek in the author’s legacy those parts that are still fully alive as literary texts, we have to turn from most of his Hebrew poetry to his Yiddish prose fiction (large parts of which Shneour brilliantly rewrote in Hebrew). Here he was not an innovator, but rather a talented continuer who further developed the narrative art of the klasiker, particularly that of Abramovitsh and Sholem Aleichem. While he learned from the former the art of detailed and meticulous realistic description of society and behavior, he absorbed from the latter the spirit of humorous conversation or causerie of a commentator who observed life from a comic vantage point. However, Shneour’s prose is not merely derivative. Shklover yidn is a complex masterpiece disguised as a sequence of innocent comic shtetl idylls. Outwardly static and replete with descriptive ethnographic detail, it seethes within with the bitter alienation of a boyhood in a restrictive society, with rebellious critique of the Jewish traditional family, with vicissitudes of a difficult puberty, and with a welter of negative emotions and childish lioffero gone wild. It contains all of the author’s sensuality and search for intellectual freedom, but presents them not as the musings of a Jewish Zarathustra, but rather as the very poignant and, indeed, tragic yearnings of a lively boy who was never given the paternal love he needed for developing a more harmonious personality. A good part of Shneour’s Hebrew works were collected in the 10-volume edition prepared before his death and published between 1957 and 1960. The Yiddish works have not been collected. Many of them were never published in book form and are to be found only in their original publications in the newspapers of the 1930s and the 1940s. Of either the Hebrew or the Yiddish works, only a few appeared in English translation, notably in Restless Spirit, edited and mostly translated by Moshe Spiegel (1963). It contains a selection of chapters from Shklover yidn and other Yiddish works, as well a dozen Hebrew poems. Suggested Reading Hillel Barzel, Shirat ha-teḥiyah: Amane ha-z´aner (Tel Aviv, 1997), pp. 137–215; David Aryeh Friedman, ‘Iyune shirah (Tel Aviv, 1964), pp. 214–261; Yeshurun Keshet, Havdalot (Tel Aviv, 1962), pp. 36–85; Joseph Klausner, Z. Shne’ur: Ha-Meshorer veha-mesaper (Tel Aviv, 1947); Dan Miron, Bodedim be-mo’adam (Tel Aviv, 1987); Dan Miron, Ha-Tsad he-afel bi-tseḥoko shel Shalom ‘Alekhem (Tel Aviv, 2004), pp. 117–195; Avraham Sha’anan, Ha-Sifrut ha-‘Ivrit ha-ḥadashah li-zerameha, vol. 4, pp. 16–52 (Tel Aviv, 1962). Zalman Shneour (1886 - 1959): his poetry It was in the decade before the First World War that Shneour became widely known to the Yiddish-speaking world. Daringly licentious verses such as Karshn, but above all the poem he originally entitled simply \"Tra-la-la-la\" which was set to music and became the beloved folksong \"Margaritkelekh\" made him famous. It opens his book 40 yor lider un poemen, 1945, from which these four later, inter-war poems have been selected. Admittedly, it stretches the point to claim Shneour as a \"poet of Poland between the Wars\", when in this period he was a cosmopolitan East European Jew living mostly in Paris - but he did live in Warsaw and in Polish Vilna before World War I. My mentor Romek Mokotow (b1924) remembers hearing Shneour called a shmadnik (a Jew ripe for conversion) in Warsaw, as a result of his focus on sexual desire. Shneour did embrace modern European culture with a passion. Our selection shows his familiarity with the ennui of the fin de siecle decadents, with Goethe\'s Faust and Nietzsche\'s Superman. His generation of readers was well acquainted with mythology through \"The Golden Bough,\" and references to Hindu mythology were common. In the poem \"We live with memories\" he describes the modern machine as an idol who destroys our young, like Kali the destroyer. All four poems are urbane, and Paris cafe living is their backbone, even if We live with memories(1929) seems to deal with successful Jewish immigrants in New York, a city Shneour had visited ten years previously. This poem expresses concern for the loss of community values of the old country, and contempt for merely material success. A Cafe Song (1930) elegantly describes the sad life of a proud, solitary emigre - including his struggle with lust. In Face to Face (1927) Shneour describes the existential loneliness of a modern city dweller, and contrasts a cowardly with a courageous approach. In the earliest of these poems, Between (1924), Shneour gives a frank account of a writer\'s moodiness - with alternating ego deflation and inflation - and its effect on his creativity. We would like to think that he calls himself Master with self-irony! The sculpting metaphor used reminds us that in Paris at the time one famed hero-artist was Rodin the sculptor (whose secretary, the poet Rilke had been thrilled to become). Shneour assumes a well-read audience that will comprehend his literary and philosophical references. His concerns were at once Jewish and universal - as with Sholem Ash, though Shneour never achieved Ash\'s success in translation. In the poem \"Between\", the first verse neatly summarizes Macbeth\'s Faustian temptation. The poem makes other literary references as well, which Beni Gothajner has detailed with his translation of the poem. Nevertheless, the images used convey the theme of artistic integrity clearly enough, even for unsophisticated readers. Shneour\'s liberal sympathy for the poor is expressed as well. Shneour\'s Life and Work Zalman Zalkind, who took the surname Shneour, (1886 - 1959) was born into a well-off family in Shklov, Belorussia. The family was traditional but not Orthodox, (despite descent from the founder of Lubavitch Chassidism, Shneour-Zalman of Liady, whose influential book Tanya was first published in Shklov). Shneour\'s nostalgic novel of 1929, Shklover Yidn, draws upon the pains and thrills of his own childhood, evoking a world the Soviets had destroyed. Shneour began writing poems in Hebrew and Yiddish when he was eight or nine years old. By the age of 12 he had decided to be a writer. His father took him to Warsaw to meet Nahum Sokolow, editor of the Hebrew daily ha-Tsefira. But Shneour\'s father wanted him to give up writing, and at 13 Shneour left home for Odessa. There Bialik recognized him as a prodigy, and nurtured him in modern Hebrew writing. By 1902 he was living in Warsaw, working in the office of a Hebrew language children\'s weekly. Here his first poems appeared. The same year his first adult poetry was published - in Hebrew and in Yiddish, in different Warsaw publications. Shneour moved to Vilna in 1904 and became known there as a young Hebrew poet, while working and writing for the periodical ha-Zeman. At twenty his first book appeared in Vilna: Hebrew poems under the title At Sunset. In 1907 Shneour embarked upon university studies, in Berne, Geneva and Paris, studying literature, philosophy and natural sciences. Dan Miron wrote that now Shneour \"invested himself... particularly in extensive rhapsodic sequences in which mood and landscape form a backdrop for philosophical rumination... and lengthy rhetorical arguments.\" His Hebrew poem of 1912 To the sound of the mandolin became celebrated. It depicts \"a Nietzchean view of the nihilist cultural present - \"God\'s demise\" - and of the tragic Jewish exilic state..\" Shneour was a medical student in Berlin when war broke out in 1914. As a Russian citizen he had to discontinue his studies and thereafter he remained a man of letters. In 1919 he first visited the USA and then returned to Berlin and established a Hebrew publishing house there. In 1924 he moved to Paris before making aliya to Palestine in 1925. His reception in Tel Aviv disappointed him. The new generation had no interest in his work. He returned to Paris and lived there for 17 years. Yet he did not abandon Hebrew, and according to Dan Miron his best lyrical poems were published in the 1933 volume Pirke ya\'ar, Forest Chapters. After the deaths of Bialik and Tchernikhovsky, some considered Shneour the leading Hebrew poet. His poems, often of epic length, Miron described as follows: \"..intellectualism and raw instinct went hand in hand in their opposition to sentimentalism and bourgeois decorum (which) often led Shneour to a combination of sensuous indulgence and intellectual pessimism that was informed by the tenets of European decadence.\" It was in Paris that Shneour came to write his great Yiddish fictions, to some degree coming to rival Sholem Asch as the most popular Yiddish writer between the Wars. Shneour\'s novels treat traditional East European Jewish life with affectionate nostalgia - together with the psychological insight of Schnitzler and Freud as well. Add in sexual attraction, and you have a book to serialize. They first appeared as instalments in New York\'s Forverts and and in Moment in Warsaw. The books appeared later: Shklover Yidn in 1929 and Feter Zhome in 1930, Noyekh Pandre in 5 epic volumes in 1938 - 9 and then a 5-volume historical novel, Kayser un Rebe, which remarkably linked Napoleon with Shneour\'s ancestor, the Lubavitsch Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady, as well as with the leading Jewish families of Shklov! Der Mamzer in 1957 was another Shklov-centred novel. Botashanski and Miron regard Shneour\'s Yiddish novels as extending the reach of Sholem Aleichem. Miron deems Shklover Yidn a masterpiece. Meanwhile Shneour continued to write poems, in Yiddish and Hebrew. In the 1930\'s he wrote plays, not all of which have been staged. Shneour and his family managed to escape from occupied France through Spain and reached New York in 1941. He visited Israel in 1949 and settled there in 1953. Israeli writers nicknamed him Giraffe, for his self-regard as a giant among pygmies. He died in New York but is buried next to Bialik in Tel Aviv, where a street bears his name. His works have been translated into nine languages. * * * * * * In 2011 some of us in Melbourne were fortunate to be guided through chapters of Shklover Yidn and of Noyekh Pandre by our teacher Danielle Charak. In loving, sensuous prose Shneour evokes a lost world. His contribution - similar to that of Sholem Ash - of extending the reach of Yiddish expressiveness cannot be appreciated in translation. We were puzzled that Shneour is not more celebrated. He is not included, for instance, in the canonical English language work \"Dictionary of Literary Biography: Writers in Yiddish (2007) ed. Joseph Sherman. Excellent translations of chapters from his novels can be found in: Restless Spirit: Selected Writings of Zalman Shneour. English versions by Moshe Spiegel 1963 Thomas Yoseloff NY . A selection of his Hebrew poetry is there as well.(see book cover below) Joseph Leftwich\'s translations of parts of Pandre were published in 1936 and 1938, and his excellent translation of the whole work ( 376pp.) appeared in 1945, entitled Song of the Dnieper. (see book cover below) The sole other translations to appear have been from his Hebrew works: Downfall, in 1944, the story of occupied Warsaw in 1915; and Eve, a biblical play, in 1954. And nothing since! What brought his eclipse? Essentially the neglect of Shneour today can be attributed to the disappearance of the Yiddish reading public. In English his books are undifferentiated in matter and manner from other European novels of his day and earlier - except for the East European settings, described with loving nostalgia, but with verisimilitude. It is the value of these depictions to us today which may see him again honoured for the fine writer he was. Hopefully he will be translated again. Shneour\'s novels cry out for translation into English. And we need a scholarly study which embraces his Yiddish and his Hebrew works, both poetry and prose. Shneour, Zalman Contents Hide Suggested ReadingAuthor (1886–1959), Hebrew and Yiddish poet and novelist. A scion of the Shneerson dynasty that has led the Lubavitch Hasidic movement since its inception, Zalman (Zalkind) Shneour was born to a middle-class, somewhat traditional family in the Belorussian town of Shklov, a center of Jewish learning, of Lubavitch Hasidism, and of the Haskalah. His childhood (which he colorfully evoked in his novella cycle Shklover yidn [Jews of Shklov; 1929]) was not a happy one. A recipient of a traditional heder education with the addition of some tutoring in modern secular studies (including Russian and modern Hebrew), Shneour became, from a very early age, an avid reader of Hebrew literature. This was definitely not encouraged by his parents, who wished to see him turn his attention to a practical career in commerce. When Shneour was 12, his father took him to Warsaw for Naḥum Sokolow, editor of the daily newspaper Ha-Tsefirah, to decide whether it was realistic to allow Shneour to indulge in writing. The meeting with Sokolow went badly, and the father and son returned home, each more determined than ever to oppose the will of the other. More than a year later, young Shneour abandoned his home and went to Odessa, then the capital of Zionist and Hebrew literary activity. He was received with warmth and compassion by Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik, who became the benevolent father figure in Shneour’s life. In 1902, Shneour left for Warsaw and found work in the editorial office of the Hebrew children’s weekly ‘Olam katan, in which his first poems for children were printed. In that same year, he published his first “adult” Hebrew and Yiddish poems in different Warsaw publications. In 1904, he moved to Vilna, where he worked for the Hebrew periodical Ha-Zeman (in which he published poems and prose, including his first extended novella, Mavet [Death], written in the form of the diary of a suicide). Falling in love with the old town (which he was later to commemorate in a famous ode) and its young women, he spent the happiest two years of his youth there, at the end of which time he was already a well-known member of the Hebrew poetic “Pleiade” (the group of young poets influenced by Bialik). In 1906, his first collection of Hebrew poems, ‘Im sheki‘at ha-ḥamah (At Sunset), was published by Tushiyah, then a bustling publishing house that monopolized contemporary “young” Hebrew writing. The book, generally well received, elicited the highest public praise from Bialik, ensuring Shneour’s poetic status as the most prominent and promising poet among his contemporaries. From La-Sevivon (To the Dreydl), by Zalman Shneour (Frankfurt, Moscow, Odessa: Omanut, 1922). Illustration by Ḥavurat Tsayarim be-Odes (Group of Artists in Odessa). This Hebrew children\'s book was prepared in Odessa in 1918-1921, but issued in Frankfurt a year later, after the repression of Hebrew culture in the Soviet Union made its publication there impossible. It is believed to have been illustrated by one or more members of a group of four students from the Odessa Art Academy, who may have needed to remain anonymous for fear of persecution. (Gross Family Collection) Emboldened, Shneour decided to leave
Eastern Europe to acquire a modern literary and scientific education in Western universities. He intermittently studied literature, philosophy, and natural sciences in Switzerland (Bern and Geneva) and in Paris. At the same time, he constantly enlarged the conceptual and generic format of his poetry. If before 1906 he had written mainly relatively short lyrical poems of mood and landscape, now he invested himself in comprehensive cycles of poems and particularly in extensive rhapsodic sequences in which mood and landscape form a backdrop for philosophical rumination (evincing the poet’s penchant for somewhat popularized Nietzschean and vitalist concepts) as well as for lengthy rhetorical arguments. Shneour’s poem “‘Im tselile ha-mandolina” (To the Sound of the Mandolin; 1912), offering a Nietzschean view of the nihilist cultural present (“God’s demise”) as well as of the tragic Jewish exilic state, was enthusiastically received as a masterpiece. Similarly celebrated was the vast symbolist sequence Be-Harim (In the Mountains; 1908–1913), a philosophical quest poem of a poet wanderer who seeks the meaning of life and art in the Swiss Alps. Shneour worked for five years on this lyrical epic, the completion of which made possible the publication of a major collection of poems, originally under the title Shirim u-fo’emot (Lyrical and Narrative Poems; 1914), but subsequently better known by the title Gesharim (Bridges). The publication in 1913 of the poem “Yeme ha-benayim mitkarvim” (The Dark Ages Draw Nigh), a rhetorical tour de force in which the poet prophesied, against the background of the Beilis
blood libel trial, the approaching rebrutalization of European civilization and reemergence of a visceral, “medieval” antisemitism, enhanced Shneour’s poetic stature by adding to his other qualities that of a prophet, a trait that the Bialikian poet–prophet model demanded from a Hebrew poet of genius. During the decade before World War I, Shneour was also prolific as the author of Hebrew and Yiddish psychological and naturalistic prose fiction. He also wrote and published Yiddish poems (among them the well-known “Margaritkelekh” [Little Daisies], which gained wide popularity as a folk song). When World War I broke out, Shneour was in Berlin, studying medicine. Carrying a Russian passport, he was now subject to many restrictions. He was forced to discontinue his studies and suffered hardships until he managed (in 1919) to leave Germany (via Copenhagen) and reach the United States. His ties with American and European Yiddish newspapers restored, Shneour went back to Germany, but after giving up on medicine, he joined the Russian Jewish businessman and cultural entrepreneur Shelomoh Zaltsman in establishing a Hebrew publishing house. The enterprise then published his collected Hebrew writings from the years 1900 to 1923 in three deluxe volumes: Gesharim (1922; a new edition of the 1914 poetry collection), Ba-Metsar (In Extremis; 1923; prose fiction), and Ḥezyonot (Visions; 1924)—the latter an extensive collection of poetry from the years 1913–1923, including well-known poems such as “Yeme ha-benayim mitkarvim,” “Vilna,” “Spartacus,” and the rhetorical pièce de résistance “Mi-Shire ha-goral” (Poems of Destiny), perhaps Shneour’s most incisive exploration of the fate of the artist as a Nietzschean superman. This new collection of poems was hailed by the established critics as representing a fully mature poet. However, Shneour’s role as a major Hebrew literary figure was, at this point, all but played out. He felt the antagonism of a young literary generation even before he attempted in 1925 to find a place for himself and his family in Palestine. Yet there, he was bitterly disappointed with his reception and with the offers the local literary establishment and Zionist officialdom could make in order to facilitate his settling down in Tel Aviv. He returned to Paris, to where he had moved from Berlin a year earlier, and made France his home for 17 years. The change in his literary career manifested itself in a dual shift of emphasis: from Hebrew to Yiddish and from poetry to prose fiction. Outwardly, this did not involve a drastic reconstruction of the author’s literary personality, since Shneour had from the onset of his career written much fiction in both languages. Also, he would continue writing Hebrew poetry (indeed, a third major collection appeared in Tel Aviv in 1933, titled Pirke ya‘ar [Forest Chapters]; it included the author’s best lyrical poems) as well as rewriting in Hebrew some of his major Yiddish novels. However, the implications of the dual shift were far-reaching. From Zalman Shneour in Warsaw to Abraham Cahan in New York, 28 November 1928. Shneour and his wife and child are visiting her father, and therefore he apologizes for delays this may cause in his delivery of installments of stories that Cahan is publishing serially in the American Yiddish newspaper Forverts: \"The Polish post is not as punctual as the French post.\" He complains that Cahan\'s refusal to allow the Canadian Yiddish newspaper Der keneder odler to reprint his work has deprived him of income, and he wants Cahan to get the Forverts to make it up to him with a bigger monthly fee for the \"4 novels that I have printed week in and week out.\" He notes that booksellers from all over Europe and America have written to him asking him to publish the novels in book form. Based on this, he is sure that a print run of 5,000–6,000 would sell out, at least 2,000 in Warsaw alone. He knows that the Forverts doesn\'t publish books but he wonders if they might make an exception this time. He awaits the next volume of Cahan\'s published memoirs and compares the latter favorably to a memoir by Shmerl Levin that he has recently read. He also alludes to the fact that Cahan is a \"martyr\" who has put aside his fiction writing for the good of \"his party.\" Yiddish. Hebrew letterhead: Z. Shneour. RG 1139, Abraham Cahan Papers, F135. (YIVO) In Paris in the summer of 1927, Shneour met with Abe Cahan, the dictatorial editor of the Forverts, the most widely circulated Yiddish newspaper in America. Cahan insisted on publishing (in weekly installments) artistic fiction of quality and was able to pay handsome salaries to writers whose narrative art appealed to him and at the same time was accessible to a wide readership. Shneour presented him with a series of brilliantly written tales and vignettes focusing on the life of a middle-class Jewish family in Shklov of the 1890s—a slightly camou
Flaged sequence of autobiographical pieces. Cahan’s reaction was enthusiastic. Not only were the stories poignant, funny, and well crafted, but they also responded to a growing cultural need, on the part of the already acculturated and relatively secure Jewish immigrants in the West, to look “homeward” to their native East European towns and hamlets, now changed and unreachable because of wars and revolutions, with bittersweet nostalgia. The success of the Shklov sequence, as it was published in weekly installments for almost a year in the Forverts (as well as in Moment, the popular Warsaw newspaper), was spectacular. Readers of the newspapers read the installments to their families as part of Sabbath relaxation. The author, who also published the stories in two volumes, Shklover yidn (1929) and Feter Zhome (Uncle Zhome; 1930; both texts went into many editions), became the most popular Yiddish fiction writer (alongside Sholem Asch) of the time, and could afford a high standard of living in his elegant villa near Paris. More important, he discovered that the impressions of life in the hometown he had left with no regret as a teenager came back now, engulfing his memory and releasing in him an unprecedented creative energy. He turned from the constrained world of middle-class Shklov to the simpler and more emotionally dynamic of one of the town’s ameratsim (ignoramuses), artisans, and workers, people of great appetites and much physical prowess and courage, and produced a vast epic with the figure of the brave teamster Noyekh Pandre at its center (Noyekh Pandre was eventually published in five volumes; 1938–1939). From there Shneour turned to Shklov, Saint Petersburg, and Paris of the beginning of the nineteenth century in an extensive, intricately plotted historical novel (Keyser un rebe [Emperor and Rabbi], with a book-form edition in five volumes; 1944–1952), in which he attempted to bring together the history of the nascent Lubavitch Hasidic movement and its founder, Reb Shneur Zalman of Liady, the career of Napoleon from soldier of the French Revolution to France’s emperor, and the secret incestuous history of a respected family of Jewish Shklov’s upper crust. More Shklov-centered novels, such as Der mamzer (The Bastard; 1957) followed. In essence, Shneour dedicated the three last decades of his life to a growing cycle of Shklov epics that absorbed the best part of his literary energy, although he also kept writing poetry in both Yiddish and Hebrew. World War II trapped Shneour and his family in occupied France. After more than a year in hiding, they managed to slip out of the country, arriving in New York in 1941. Thanks to his ties with the Forverts, the writer managed to settle down in relative comfort, continuing the interrupted publication of his Yiddish fiction. He stayed in the United States until the early 1950s when he decided to relocate to Israel, which he had visited in 1949. He lived there intermittently throughout the last decade of his life. Greatly inspired by Israel’s triumphs, Shneour nevertheless experienced much disillusionment and disappointment, facing an Israeli culture with readers and a literary establishment that had little use for him. He prepared a 10-volume edition of his Hebrew works, issued between 1957 and 1960. He died in New York in 1959. A year later, his remains were buried in Tel Aviv not far from those of Bialik and Sha’ul Tchernichowsky. A street was named after Shneour in the city by which, for much of his life, he had felt rejected. Historically, Shneour’s contribution to the growth of post-Bialikian Hebrew poetry during the first two decades of the twentieth century consists of his contributions to the following three developments. The first was the refashioning of the genre of the poema, a very central genre in Hebrew poetry that Shneour wrenched out of its linear narrative matrix and, in the spirit of the then-current symbolism, reconstructed as a vast lyrical flow of fantasy, description, philosophical cogitation, and rhetorical harangue—all held together by theme, rhythm, and musical pattern rather than by a story line. The second development was prosodic and stylistic. The third was thematic and ideational. Shneour extracted from the “spirit” of the so-called Hebrew national renaissance the instinctual and liofferinous principles that were inherent in it and took them as far as the culture of his time would allow. His was a rebellious poetry in which intellectualism and raw instinct went hand in hand in their opposition to sentimentalism and bourgeois decorum. This often led Shneour to a combination of sensuous indulgence and intellectual pessimism that was informed by the tenets of European decadence. On another level, if we seek in the author’s legacy those parts that are still fully alive as literary texts, we have to turn from most of his Hebrew poetry to his Yiddish prose fiction (large parts of which Shneour brilliantly rewrote in Hebrew). Here he was not an innovator, but rather a talented continuer who further developed the narrative art of the klasiker, particularly that of Abramovitsh and Sholem Aleichem. While he learned from the former the art of detailed and meticulous realistic description of society and behavior, he absorbed from the latter the spirit of humorous conversation or causerie of a commentator who observed life from a comic vantage point. However, Shneour’s prose is not merely derivative. Shklover yidn is a complex masterpiece disguised as a sequence of innocent comic shtetl idylls. Outwardly static and replete with descriptive ethnographic detail, it seethes within with the bitter alienation of a boyhood in a restrictive society, with rebellious critique of the Jewish traditional family, with vicissitudes of a difficult puberty, and with a welter of negative emotions and childish lioffero gone wild. It contains all of the author’s sensuality and search for intellectual freedom, but presents them not as the musings of a Jewish Zarathustra, but rather as the very poignant and, indeed, tragic yearnings of a lively boy who was never given the paternal love he needed for developing a more harmonious personality. A good part of Shneour’s Hebrew works were collected in the 10-volume edition prepared before his death and published between 1957 and 1960. The Yiddish works have not been collected. Many of them were never published in book form and are to be found only in their original publications in the newspapers of the 1930s and the 1940s. Of either the Hebrew or the Yiddish works, only a few appeared in English translation, notably in Restless Spirit, edited and mostly translated by Moshe Spiegel (1963). It contains a selection of chapters from Shklover yidn and other Yiddish works, as well a dozen Hebrew poems. Suggested Reading Hillel Barzel, Shirat ha-teḥiyah: Amane ha-z´aner (Tel Aviv, 1997), pp. 137–215; David Aryeh Friedman, ‘Iyune shirah (Tel Aviv, 1964), pp. 214–261; Yeshurun Keshet, Havdalot (Tel Aviv, 1962), pp. 36–85; Joseph Klausner, Z. Shne’ur: Ha-Meshorer veha-mesaper (Tel Aviv, 1947); Dan Miron, Bodedim be-mo’adam (Tel Aviv, 1987); Dan Miron, Ha-Tsad he-afel bi-tseḥoko shel Shalom ‘Alekhem (Tel Aviv, 2004), pp. 117–195; Avraham Sha’anan, Ha-Sifrut ha-‘Ivrit ha-ḥadashah li-zerameha, vol. 4, pp. 16–52 (Tel Aviv, 1962).
1923 Jewish HAND SIGNED Hebrew POEM BOOK Autograph ZALMAN SHNEUR Yiddish JUDAICA:
$145.00