Salomon Ettinger

Salomon Ettinger (also: Salomo Ettinger or Solomon Ettinger ; born 1803 in Warsaw , Russian Empire ; died 1856 in Szadonow near Zamość , where he worked as a doctor) was a linguistically creative Yiddish writer from a very respected Jewish family who, although he also wrote German and kept his Yiddish free from Germanisms. He is considered the grandfather of Yiddish literature (referred to as grandfather holds Mendele Mocher Sforim ).

life and work

Salomon Ettinger became an orphan at an early age , then was raised in Lentschitz by his grandfather, Rabbi Mendl Ettinger . He married at the age of 17, first lived in Zamość with his father-in-law and after his father-in-law's financial ruin went to Odessa , where he could not find a job, then studied medicine in Lviv , and after successfully completing his studies back in Zamość, for many years an extended one To operate a medical practice and at the same time indulge in his literary inclinations.

He wrote fables and parables (which initially appeared scattered in various journals, then collected in Saint Petersburg in 1889 under the title Mescholim un Lidelach, edited by his son Wilhelm Ettinger), whose ideas and subjects he took from Schiller , Lessing , Heine and others, which were published in but the form is short, concise, sharp-witted and humorous, rich in images and absolutely independent; wrote epigrams, poems (including Rachel at her child's grave ), ballads ( Walheid ) and dramas (two fragments of which have survived).

His play in five acts Serkele ( Serkale or Jahrzeit nach a Brider , printed for the first time in Johannesburg in 1861, a second edition then again in 1874 in. ) Was created under the impression of the Haskala movement (although he does not belong in the series of the "Enlightenment") Warsaw, first performance in 1862 at the rabbinical school of Zhitomir , which was sponsored by the government at the time , in which Goldfaden played the role of the serkele, an "uneducated" but vigorous woman who kept her "studying" husband afloat by all sorts of tricks and deceptions) Staged with great success by the director S. Turkow at the Warschauer Theater Zentral in 1923 , it is probably the first Yiddish play ( Aksenfeld's dramatic works were intended more for private reading circles).

Salomon Ettinger also wrote aphorisms and a larger poem, Dus Lecht, influenced by Schiller's Song of the Bell .

A critical edition of Salomon Ettinger's Collected Works was published in Warsaw in 1925 by Max Weinreich in two volumes (including an introduction to life and work, bibliography and selected letters).

literature

• Georg Herlitz (first name): Jewish Lexicon , Vol. 2 . Athenäum Verlag, Frankfurt / M. 1982, ISBN 3-7610-0370-6 (reprint of the Berlin 1927 edition), col. 539 f.
• John F. Oppenheimer (Red.) And a .: Lexicon of Judaism. 2nd Edition. Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, Gütersloh u. a. 1971, ISBN 3-570-05964-2 , col. 194.
• Salomon Wininger : Great Jewish National Biography, Vol. 2 . Kraus Reprint, Nendeln 1978 (reprint of the Czernowitz edition 1925–1936) p. 201 ff.
• Ettinger, Salomon. In: Encyclopaedia Judaica , 1971, Volume 6, Sp. 954f.