Jossel Birstein

Jossel Birstein , also Yosl Birshteyn ( Hebrew יוסל בירשטיין; born September 24, 1920 in Biała Podlaska , Poland ; died December 28, 2003 in Jerusalem , Israel ) was an Israeli writer of Polish origin. He wrote his works in Ivrit and Yiddish .

Live and act

Jossel Birstein grew up in the small Polish town of Biała Podlaska, where he visited the cheder . In 1937 he emigrated to Australia and was a soldier in the Australian Army for four years during World War II . In 1941 he married Margaret Weisberg that her first name in Israel Marganit changed . The couple had two daughters, Chana and Nurit. Birstein's family members in Poland were victims of the Shoah .

In 1950 Birstein left Australia and immigrated to Israel with his family. They initially lived in Kibbutz Gwat on the Jezreel plain , where Birstein worked as a shepherd for eleven years . In an interview he reports how Chaim Gwati , later Minister of Agriculture and then responsible for the administration of the kibbutz, had chosen him to be a shepherd because he had come from Australia, the land of sheep . "In truth," emphasizes Birstein, "I lived in Melbourne for 14 years and didn't even see the tail of a sheep there."

Birstein then moved to Kirjat Tiw'on and later to Nazrat Illit , where he was employed by the Hapoalim bank and made it up to the director of the investment department. In 1982 he moved to Jerusalem . He began telling short stories on the military radio and appeared as a storyteller across Israel. He had published his first volume of poetry in Melbourne in 1949 in Yiddish under the title Unter Fremde Himlen (German: "Unter Fremd Himmeln"). His first book of stories, On Narrow Sidewalks , appeared in Yiddish in 1958 and in Hebrew in 1959, and described life in the kibbutz. Birstein wrote most of his stories in Yiddish and, with the help of Nissim Aloni and the literary scholar Menachem Perry, translated them into Ivrit. He also worked in the Jerusalem University Library , now the National Library of Israel . His last novel, “Don't call me Job”, was published in Hebrew in 1995 and contains stories from Poland, Australia and Israel.

His works have been translated into German several times, including the novel “Face in the Clouds”, an elegy on the decline of Yiddish literature , and the stories “On the way in the streets of Jerusalem”. Birstein died in Jerusalem in 2003.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Job in Jewish antiquity and modernity. Pp. 319-332.

literature

• Gabriele Oberhänsli-Widmer: Job in Jewish antiquity and modernity: The history of the impact of Job in Jewish literature. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016.

Web links

• Entry with pearl divers