Matityahu Shoham

Matityahu Moshe Shoham (Polakewitsch) ( Hebrew מתתיהו שוהם; *  1893 in Warsaw ; † 1937 ibid) was a Hebrew poet and playwright.

Life

Shoham, orphaned in early childhood, was raised by his grandfather and uncle. He learned foreign languages ​​and secular literature mainly as an autodidact. In 1930 he moved to Palestine . However, since he was unable to earn his living there, he returned to Poland two years later. For three years he was chairman of the Association of Jewish Writers in Poland and a member of the editorial board of its twice-monthly magazine Amudim and also lectured at the Institute for Jewish Studies in Warsaw. His lyric poems, written in an archaic style, deal primarily with the theme of love and the biblical past. His four dramatic poems: Jericho , Balaam (1928-29), Zor wi-jeruschalaim ( Tire and Jerusalem , 1933) and Elohei Barsel lo ta'aseh lecha (You shouldn't make gods out of cast iron, 1937) are also archaic Language written and hardly performed on stage because of its ideological expressionism and its long reflective passages. The literary value of his dramas, however, rests on the ideological and emotional tensions between his Jewish and non-Jewish protagonists. Only the last two plays appeared in book form during the author's lifetime, the rest of the works were published as Gesammelte Werke in 1965.

literature

• Encyclopedia Judaica . Volume 14, pp. 1449-1452.

Web links

• Short biography (English) with picture