Deer David Nomberg

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Deer David Nomberg
Hirsch David Nomberg, Chaim Zhitlovsky , Schalom Asch , Itzhok Lejb Perez , Abraham Reisen during the Chernivtsi Conference 1908 (from left to right)

Hirsch David Nomberg , also Hersh David (born April 14, 1876 in Mszczonów , Russian Empire ; died November 21, 1927 in Otwock , Poland ) was a Polish writer and publicist in Yiddish .

Life

Hirsch David Nomberg was born in Amschinow, the Yiddish name for the small Polish-Jewish town of Mszczonów, which was located in the Russian Empire at the time. He grew up with his maternal grandfather, who was a businessman and a devout Hasid . In 1894 he married, but since he was stricken with religious doubts, he had to separate from his wife and child as a heretic. He moved to neighboring Warsaw and showed his first Hebrew poems to the writer Itzhok Lejb Perez , who prompted him to write in Yiddish from then on. He lived from working as a Hebrew teacher and was the first point of contact for young Jewish intellectuals in the Polish metropolis, for example for Shalom Asch and for Abraham Reisen , for whom he later translated into Russian.

His first publications of poems and short stories, which he also translated into Hebrew himself, began in 1900, and he had his first success in 1905 with the story Fliglman . From 1905 he was a full-time writer, editor, editor and translator. Between 1905 and 1907 Nomberg stayed for some time in Germany, France and Switzerland, the following year in Riga and Vilnius , where he was able to work as a journalist and publish his own prose. From Warsaw he took part in the Chernivtsi Conference in 1908, at which he reached a compromise on the language issue that Yiddish was “one” but not “the” language of the Jews. In 1911 he made a trip to the USA . After Perez's death in 1915, Nomberg became the main literary figure on the Yiddish literary scene in Warsaw. During the German occupation of Poland in World War I , he was a sponsor of the first secular Yiddish schools in Poland and was a co-organizer of the “Yiddish People's Party of Poland”, for which he was elected as a member of the Sejm after the re-establishment of Poland in 1919–1920 . Nomberg was from 1925 to 1927 chairman of the Jewish Association of Writers and Journalists in Warsaw. He made further trips, for example to Argentina , to Palestine , although he was not a Zionist, and to the Soviet Union , and published travel reports.

Nomberg also translated William Shakespeare and Gerhart Hauptmann into Yiddish, he wrote only one drama himself, Di mishpokhe (1913). Nomberg was looking for a Jewish identity ("Yidishizm") that should stand out from the medieval narrowness of the Stetl . At the same time, this identity was supposed to assert itself against the prejudices of Western European Judaism, which in Eastern Jewish culture only wanted to see beards , sidelocks , the face distorted by worry and the eyes horrified by pogroms . In his novellas, which appeared in several collections primarily in Yiddish but also in Hebrew, he described the type of intellectual worn down in the struggle for new values.

Nomberg was buried in the Warsaw Jewish Cemetery near the “Trzech Pisarzy” mausoleum, where Perez was buried, and more than ten thousand of his readers said goodbye. Both graves later survived the terror of the German occupation of Poland. In 1928, in the Maison de la Culture Yiddish in Paris , the Nomberg-bibliotek baym Medem-farband was named after him.

Tomb in Warsaw

Fonts (selection)

  • Wing Man: Novellas from the Jewish . Edited, translated and introduced by A. Suhl. Leipzig: Verlag Schemesch, 1924.
  • Gezamelṭe ṿerḳ . Berlin: Klaal farlag, 1922
  • Di mishpokhe. In fir actn . Berlin: Klal, 1921

literature

  • M. Ravitch: Nomberg, Hersh David . In: Encyclopaedia Judaica , Volume 12, Jerusalem 1973, Col. 1209-1210 (English). With changes to jewishvirtuallibrary
  • Hirsch Dawid Nomberg , in: Jüdisches Lexikon , Volume 4 / I., 1927, pp. 518f
  • Maria Kühn-Ludewig: Yiddish books from Berlin (1918-1936): titles, people, publishers . Nümbrecht: Kirsch, 2008 ISBN 978-3-933586-56-8
  • Angelika Glau: Changing Jewish Self-Image: Yiddish Literature at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century . Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999 ISBN 3-447-04183-8 Zugl .: Potsdam, Univ., Diss., 1998

Web links

Commons : Hirsch David Nomberg  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hirsch Dawid Nomberg, Transliteration into German at the Jewish Lexicon. Biographical information according to the Jewish Lexicon, Encyclopaedia Judaica and Angelika Glau: Jewish self-understanding in change . 1999, pp. 127-134
  2. Angelika Glau: Jewish Self-Understanding in Change , p. 132
  3. Jewish Lexicon, p. 519