Eisik Meir Dick

Eisik Meir Dick

Eisik Meir Dick (also: Eisik Meier Dick , Isaak Meir Dick , Ayzik-Meyer Dik , Isaak Mayer Dick , Isaac Mayer Dick etc., acronym: אמ"ד ; Israel Meir Dick also occurs; * 1807 in Wilna , Russian Empire ; † January 24, 1893 ibid) was a popular, prolific Hebrew and Yiddish writer and translator, was a pioneer of Haskala and secular Yiddish literature, author of fairy tales, novels, folk stories, songs, sentimental stories and jokes, but also wrote a myriad of educational ones , popular educational texts on educational issues, family life, the nonsense of superstition, languages, etc., wrote biographies of famous men and translated from various European languages ​​into Yiddish.

Life

Israel Meir Dick was the son of a cantor , received a religious education, was married early and then lived with his in-laws in Neswitz ( Minsk Gouvernement ), where he learned the German language from a Catholic priest and familiarized himself with German literature.

He later moved to Vilnius, pursued further studies, made friends with some outstanding Hebrew writers from the circle of the Haskala movement, which he actively joined (criticized - but always in a mild, relaxed manner, which certainly contributed to his great success - Educational errors, early marriages, passivity and idleness, hypocrisy and moral decline), and himself (1841) became a Hebrew teacher at the first school founded by Tsar Nicholas I and was also committed to school reforms.

It was not until the early 1940s that he came out publicly with his writings.

His importance and attitude as a writer

He devoted almost 50 years of his writing activity to Yiddish literature, although, like almost all Maskilim, he despised the "jargon" and used it (initially only hesitantly anonymous) to talk about the broad masses of the Jewish people, especially the Lithuanian Jews to offer appealing, high-quality narrative material, which should morally improve his people and at the same time enlighten them about the big, wide world and its doings and overcome the inner boundaries of the Jewish religion and the outer boundaries of the shtetl .

In contrast to Israel Aksenfeld , for example , he preferred a variant of Yiddish that was not indebted to the spoken language of the people, but rather to standard German, which he perceived as the language of the educated. He was one of the first successful Yiddish authors and at the same time a long-time contract writer and story line producer for the publishing company Romm (which later became the world's largest Jewish publishing house), which had signed him exclusively and paid him a comfortable weekly salary. Yiddish fiction and the tradition of (in his case still strongly moralizing) penny novels (in the vast majority of cases with a happy ending) begin with Dick.

He enriched Yiddish literature with the genres of realistic and historical narration, humorous sketches and fantasy novels.

Works (selection)

• Horeach , 1846 (description of the stay of Moses Montefiore in Vilna)
• Masecheth anijuth , Berlin 1848 (then again Wilna 1878, " Treatise on poverty", satire that masterfully imitates the Talmudic style)
• Mechsah mul Mechsah , Warsaw 1861 (story, Yiddish adaptation under the title "The Purim Mirror")
• Sifronah , Wilna 1869 (story)
• Jokes and Tips or Anecdotes , 1873–1875
• Jokes about jokes , 1874
• Old yidishe zagen or sipurim , Vilna 1876
• The Yiddisher Posliannik , 1880
• The beautiful Minka , 1886
• Note Ganaf , 1887
• Old Jewish sagas (no year)
• Siphre musar (no year)
• Jehudith, the second (no year)
• Ger Zedek (no year)
• Work edition Geklibene Werk , Wilna (Shreberk), ca.1900

literature

• Salman Reisen : Lexicon fun of Yiddish literature and press . Wilna 1914, pp. 711–734, with an exhaustive bibliography