Simon Frug

Ravnitzki, An-ski , Mendele , Bialik , Frug, before 1916 (from left to right)

Simon Frug (name variants: Simeon Samuel Frug , Semjon Grigorjewitsch Frug , Shimon Shmuel Frug etc .; born on November 15, 1859 in Bobrowy Kut, Cherson Governorate ; died on September 22, 1916 in St. Petersburg or Odessa ) was a Russian Jewish folk poet .

life and work

Frug grew up in the agricultural colony of Bobrowy Kut in the Cherson Governorate among Jewish farmers . The model colony was founded by Tsar Nicholas I for excellent Jewish soldiers.

Simon Frug wrote ballads, legends, biblical poems, elegies, satires, ghetto and songs of Zion - usually at the highest level (only in his satires he fell in part on the level of Badchanim down) - in Russian , Yiddish (since 1885) and the Hebrew language and was for a time the idol of Jewish youth. Some of his songs became folk songs (for example his song of work ).

He first devoted himself to poetry in the Russian language and wrote for the most prestigious Petersburg newspapers, but was then painfully thrown back to his Judaism by the bloody events of the early 1880s, like many Jews in Russia , so that a Russian striving for equality and assimilation Poet became a Jewish Zionist national poet . From then on, he published a large number of songs, feature books and other articles in Yiddish newspapers and once again orientated himself - unaffected by the Haskala - to the world of the Stetl , which he did not, however, self- sufficiently glorify , but rather the miserable and miserable in him, the decrepit - The poor, hectic and unhealthy of its residents, highlighted, lamented and poetically traced. So he became one of the co-founders of Yiddish poetry or was the first to bring it to maturity.

Well-known poems, songs and legends

His most famous works include:

• The spring leaves, the spring falls
• The golden key (legend in verse-bound language)
• The Koss ("The Mug", Midrash legend)
• The shame's daughter (the shame's little daughter; legend)
• The nature
• Hot and cold (lament about ghetto life)
• Sand un Schtern (sand and stars; poem in which the reproach to God for having only made the first half of the promise to Abraham come true)
• For Cheider , children

expenditure

• Editions of his song collections in 1882, 1885, 1887, 1890
• Songs and Thoughts , 1896
• Hebrew translation of his Russian works, 1897 (translated by Kaplan at Toschiah Verlag, Warsaw)
• Collected works, 6 volumes (Russian), 1904
• Collected works, 2 volumes (Yiddish), ed. from "Fraind" in St. Petersburg, 1904
• Collected Works, 3 volumes (Yiddish), New York 1910
• Collected works, 6 volumes (Russian), 1912

Sources / literature

• Historia nowejschei russkoi literaturi , St. Petersburg 1893
• Samuel Meisels , Westöstliche Miszellen , Leipzig 1908
• M. Pines: The history of Jewish-German literature , Leipzig 1913
• Dubnow : memories of Frug . In: Jewrejskaja Starina IV, 1916
• M. Bassin: Antalogy [sic!] : Five Hundred Years Yiddish Poetry , New York 1917
• Zygmunt Foebus Finkelstein: striker of the ghetto. Essays , Vienna 1924
• Salomon Wininger : Great Jewish National Biography , Volume II, Czernowitz 1925 ff.
• Travel : Lexicon ... , 1926 ff.
• Jewish Lexicon , Volume II, Berlin 1927 ff.
• Brockhaus Encyclopedia , Vol. VI. 1968
• John F. Oppenheimer (Red.) And a .: Lexicon of Judaism. 2nd Edition. Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, Gütersloh u. a. 1971, ISBN 3-570-05964-2 , col. 226.
• Günter Stemberger : History of Jewish Literature , 1977

Web links

Commons : Simon Frug  - collection of images, videos and audio files