Meir Wiener (literary scholar)

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Meir Wiener (born 1893 in Cracow , Austria-Hungary ; died October 1941 near Wjasma , Soviet Union ) was a Polish-Austrian writer and literary scholar of Yiddish .

Life

Wiener grew up in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Cracow in a Yiddish, German and Polish speaking family. He attended the German grammar school in Krakow and received additional lessons at home. He moved with his family to Vienna , after the outbreak of the First World War , Wiener was exempted from military service as unfit and went to Basel and Zurich in Switzerland to study philosophy in 1915 , albeit without obtaining an academic degree. From 1919 he worked as an editor in Berlin . In 1925 he joined the KPÖ in Austria , but moved on to Paris . From autumn 1926 he stayed in the Soviet Union in Kharkiv , where he wrote for the Yiddish magazine Di royte velt . In Kiev he became the head of the literary and folk art department of the Institute for Jewish Proletarian Culture. Between 1935 and 1938 he headed the Department of Yiddish Language and Literature at the Moscow Pedagogical Institute . After the German invasion of the Soviet Union , he was drafted into the Moscow writers' battalion and died in early October 1941 on the front near Vyazma .

From 1919 Wiener published articles on Yiddish and Hebrew literature in the Zionist German-language magazines Der Jude , "Jerubbaal" and "Menora". In 1920 he wrote a sharp criticism of the bourgeois character of Zionism in the Austrian Zionist magazine "Esra". In 1922 Wiener assisted the Prague Rabbi Heinrich Brody in his Anthologia Hebraica .

In 1920, Wiener published a collection of Yiddish poetry and a translation of Hebrew poetry, which Gershom Scholem criticized for its inaccuracy and Wiener's reference to spiritual expressionism . Wiener came to Berlin around 1924 under the influence of the writers Leyb Kvitko and Der Nister , who, like him, were interested in a connection between Judaism and communism. After moving to the Soviet Union in 1926 , Wiener was able to print his first novel Ele Faleks untergang , written in Berlin in 1923 and set in prewar Krakow. His second novel, Kolev Ashkenazi , was published in 1934 and is set in 17th century Krakow. In the Soviet Union he turned to Marxist literary theory .

Wiener's work on literary history, which was interrupted by the war, was published posthumously in New York City in 1945 under the title Tsu der geshikhte fun der yidisher literature in the 19th century . The focus of his research is on the authors of Haskala , Israel Aksenfeld , Salomon Ettinger , Mendele Moicher Sforim and Sholem Aleichem . Posthumously published in the 1960s in the Soviet Union his childhood memories and the novella Los khudios . His magnum opus , a novel about the Berlin Jews of the 1920s , has not yet been published.

Fonts (selection)

  • The Poetry of Kabbalah: An Anthology. Spiritual poetry of the Jews in post-poetry , Vienna: Löwit, 1920
  • Messiah. Three seals , Vienna: Löwit, 1920
  • with Heinrich Brody : Anthologia hebraica , Insel Verlag, Leipzig (5682) 1922. ( Mivḥar ha-shirah ha-ʻIvrit: le-mi-yom ḥatom ketave ha-ḳodesh ʻad-gelot Yiśrael me-ʻal ʼadmat Sefarad bi-shenat 5252 )
  • Of the symbols: ten chapters on the expression of the spirit , Berlin; Vienna: Benjamin Harz, 1924
  • Jewish piety and religious dogma , Berlin: Philo Verlag, 1924
  • Ele Faleḳs unṭergang , Kharkiv, Melukhe-Farlag fun Ukraine, 1929
  • Genarṭe ṿelṭ: ḳomedye fun an umbaḳanṭn aṿṭor inem tsṿeyṭn yortsendliḳ funem nayntsnṭn yorhunderṭ , Mosḳṿe: Melukhe-farlag "Der Emes", 1940.
  • Tsu der geshikhṭe fun der Yidisher liṭeraṭur in 19ṭn yorhunderṭ: eṭyudn un maṭeryaln. From 1893–1941 , Kiev, Melukhe-farlag far di natsionale minderhayṭn in USSR, 1940
  • Dos shṭernṭikhl: roman
  • Nokh tsṿey hozn: noṿele
  • Vegn Sholem Aleichem's Humor , 1941

literature

  • Mikhail Krutikov: From Kabbalah to class struggle: expressionism, Marxism, and Yiddish literature in the life and work of Meir Wiener , Stanford, Calif .: Stanford University Press, 2011. Review by Susanne Klingenstein in the FAZ , March 21, 2012.
  • Wiener, Meir , Encyclopaedia Judaica , 1973, vol. 16, col. 501 f.
  • Armin A. Wallas (Ed.): Eugen Hoeflich . Diaries 1915 to 1927 . Vienna: Böhlau, 1999 ISBN 3-205-99137-0 , p. 370f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jerubbaal: a magazine d. Jewish youth at DNB.
  2. ^ Esra: Monthly of the Jewish Academic / Jewish University Committee, Vienna at DNB.
  3. ↑ The transcription of the Yiddish literature references is partly taken from the English-language WorldCat .
personal data
SURNAME Wiener, Meir
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Viner, Meyer
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish-Austrian writer and literary scholar of Yiddish
DATE OF BIRTH 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Krakow
DATE OF DEATH October 1941
Place of death Vyazma , Soviet Union