Jizchak Katzenelson

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Jizchak Katzenelson

Jizchak Katzenelson (also: Isaak , also Kazenelson etc .; Hebrew יצחק קצנלסון, Yiddish יצחק קאצנעלסאָן; Polish Icchak Kacenelson ;) (born July 21, 1886 in Korelicze, today Karelitschy , near Nowogrudok ; died May 1, 1944 in Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp ) was a Jewish poet and playwright who wrote in Hebrew and Yiddish and was the founder of the New Hebrew drama applies. His last poems, hidden in a camp in eastern France, some of which were translated into Hebrew after the war ( The Song of the Slain Jewish People ; Diary ; Hannibal ; General Staff ), are unique, harrowing documents of the Jewish experience of suffering.

life and work

Jizchak Katzenelson was born in Karelicz (the spellings vary) in the Minsk governorate in 1886 as the son of the Hebrew writer Jakob Benjamin Katzenelson (1859 Kapulie - 1930 Łódź , pseudonym Ben Jamini ). Since 1911, Jizchak Katzenelson, who had already started to write songs at the age of 13, published plays in Hebrew and Yiddish. His drama Anu chajim umetim (“We Live and Die”) was the first in Hebrew at the Moscow Habima Theater .

Katzenelson lived as a teacher in Łódź, where his family had moved in the year he was born. Two months after the Germans marched into Poland , he fled with his wife and three sons to Warsaw in November 1939 , where they ended up in the ghetto and were stranded. Jizchak Katzenelson himself then operated there u. a. an underground school for Jewish children. His wife and two sons were deported to Treblinka and gassed there immediately upon arrival . He founded the Hebrew Theater in Warsaw and organized Yiddish cultural work after the occupation of Poland. As early as 1912 he had founded a Hebrew theater, Jewish kindergartens and elementary schools in Łódź.

Katzenelson was actively involved in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising that began on April 19, 1943. In order to save his life, the command of the Jewish fighting organization procured him forged Honduran papers and smuggled him into the “Aryan part” of Warsaw, where, like many others, he hoped in vain to reach freedom via the Hotel Polski . Instead he was sent to a special concentration camp in Vittel on the edge of the Vosges . Mostly American and British citizens were interned there, who were to be exchanged for interned Germans in hostile countries. There he also wrote his Lid funm ojsgehargetn jidischen folk (completion of the manuscript on January 17, 1944). He buried the manuscript, packed in bottles, under a tree together with fellow prisoner Miriam Novitch, who survived. The camp was then liberated by the Allies on September 12, 1944. A copy of the manuscript, sewn into a suitcase handle, was smuggled into Palestine in 1944 by a camp companion to whom he had given it. Both copies have been preserved.

At the end of April 1944, Katzenelson and his seventeen-year-old son Zwi were deported to Auschwitz in "Konvoi 72" , where they were gassed on May 1 or 3, 1944. Before that he had met his old friend from earlier days in Lodz, Dr. Nathan Eck (d. Tel Aviv February 22, 1982), met again, who was also to be deported from Vittel to Auschwitz in April 1944, but who had managed to jump off the train and escape to Paris . In February 1945, before the end of the war, he published Katzenelson's work Dos Lid ... in the original Yiddish language in Paris. Nathan Eck had had to promise Katzenelson in Vittel that he would publish Dos Lid ... if the poet did not survive the war.

Works (selection)

  • Amnon (drama performed by Habima)
  • Anu chajim umetim , Warsaw 1913 (drama)
  • Bachurim (drama)
  • Bigwulot Lita , Warsaw 1907 (Poem, several subsequent editions)
  • Book of Songs , translation of Heinrich Heine's work into Hebrew (1904)
  • Decadents (drama)
  • Dimdumim , Warsaw 1910 (collection of Hebrew poems in 2 parts)
  • Dos lid funm ojsgehargetn jidischen folk , 1944 (15 chants, divided into 225 long four-line stanzas; translated into many languages)
  • You wasse life (stories)
  • Fatima , 1920 (dramatic poetry)
  • General Staff
  • Hamegl , Warsaw 1911 (drama)
  • Hannibal
  • Cartoons [sic] (drama)
  • Machmadim , 1924
  • Saul Hanuvi , 1922 (biblical drama)
  • diary
  • Taltallim , 1922
  • Tarschisch , 1923 (drama)
  • Over the world (drama in which he describes his travels through Europe, America and Palestine)
  • Our nunte Bakanne , 1922 (lyric drama)
  • 26 children's stories, Warsaw 1911
  • 606 (drama)

Transfers into German

  • Hermann Adler : The Song of the Last Jew. Europa Verlag AG, Zurich, 1951 (“trilingual”: Yiddish-Yiddish in Latin transcription-German; also: Berliner Edition Hentrich 1992).
  • Wolf Biermann , Great Song of the Exterminated Jewish People , Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1994 ("trilingual": facsimile of the original - Yiddish in Latin transcription - German; transcription by Arno Lustiger , ISBN 3-462-02355-1 )
  • Helmut Homfeld: The song of the murdered [sic] Jewish people. 1996 (literal translation of "dos lid funm ojsgehargetn yidic folk", private publication).
  • Helmut Homfeld: Oh my people! My people ... records from the internment camp Vittel. (Translation of the "Vittel Diary". Metropol Verlag, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-936411-12-3 )

Literature / sources

  • Israel Sergei Zinberg, in: Jewrejskaja Enziklopedija (Vol. IX.), Petersburg 1906 ff.
  • Reisen , Leksikon ... , 1914
  • Hatekufa , vol. 1924
  • Salomon Wininger : Great Jewish National Biography . 1925 ff. Vol. III + Vol. VII (additions)
  • Literary sheets , 1926 (pp. 839–840)
  • Leon Julius Silberstrom: Isaak Katzenelson . In: Jewish Lexicon , Berlin 1927 (Vol. III)
  • Bibliography of his works in Lodzer Tageblatt (yidd.) From May 2, 1928
  • Folk and Country , 1928 (No. 9)
  • Literary sheets , 1928, pp. 342–343.
  • Zippora Nachumow-Katzenelson: Jizchok Katzenelson. Sain Lebn un Schaffn . Buenos Aires 1948 (biography of his sister)
  • Pnina Navé: The New Hebrew Literature . Bern / Munich 1962
  • Kazenelson, Yitzchak . In: Brockhaus Enzyklopädie , Vol. 10, Wiesbaden 1970
  • Serge Klarsfeld : Le Mémorial de la Déportation des Juifs de France. Paris 1978.
  • Arno Lustiger : To the struggle to the life and death! The book on the resistance of the Jews in Europe 1933–1945. Cologne 1994.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ According to other information on May 3, 1944
  2. ↑ This poem, which was later translated into many languages, is now regarded as his most important work and completely conceals his other work and his reputation and pre-war perception as a Hebrew-Yiddish (theater) writer, pedagogue and educator
personal data
SURNAME Katzenelson, Jizchak
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kaznelson, Jizchok
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Jewish poet and playwright
DATE OF BIRTH July 21, 1886
PLACE OF BIRTH Korelicze
DATE OF DEATH May 1, 1944
Place of death Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp