Yonah Rozenfeld
Yonah Rozenfeld (1880-July 9, 1944) was a Yiddish writer, known for his psychological stories.
Biography
[edit]Rozenfeld was born in 1880, in Staryi Chortoryisk, Ukraine.[1] Rozenfeld was educated at a yeshiva but he left at the age of thirteen following the death of his parents from cholera.[2] With the support of I.L. Peretz, he published his first story in 1904 in the St. Petersburg Yiddish daily Der fraynd.[3] His early stories were autobiographical accounts of working class Jews, and lacked the psychological focus of his later work.[4] After living in Kovel and Kyiv, he emigrated to the United States in 1921.[5]
Rozenfeld was a frequent contributor of stories to Forverts until the 1930s when he left the paper following an argument with Abraham Cahan.[6] Earlier, in 1922, Cahan had praised Rozenfeld as one of Yiddish literature's "greatest artists", along with Sholem Asch.[7] While he remained employed and paid by Cahan's paper, the editor refused to publish many of his manuscripts, leading to tension between the two men.[8] According to Irving Howe, this fight became the subject of gossip among Yiddish intellectuals.[9]
Rozenfeld's prose has been described as "deftly searching", with a "lucid and lyrical flow".[10] In 1923, Lewis Browne described him as the Yiddish writer who "leads a group of psychological fiction writers".[11] In addition to his stories, Rozenfeld was the author of the autobiographical novel Eyner aleyn, the story of an apprentice in Russia and his relationship with his boss' family.[12]
Rozenfeld's papers are held at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and include an unpublished 101-page autobiography.[12]
References
[edit]- ^ "YIVO | Rozenfeld, Yona". yivoencyclopedia.org. Retrieved 2024-06-19.
- ^ Brown, Jeremy (2023). The Eleventh Plague: Jews and Pandemics from the Bible to COVID-19. Oxford University Press. p. 14. ISBN 9780197607183.
- ^ Hundert, Gershon David. The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. Vol. 2. Yale University Press. p. 1601. ISBN 9780300119039.
- ^ Frumkin, Jacob; Aronson, Gregor; Goldenweiser, Alexis, eds. (1966). Russian Jewry (1860-1917). Thomas Yoseloff. p. 360.
- ^ "Rozenfeld, Yoyne (1880–July 9, 1944) — the Congress for Jewish Culture". congressforjewishculture.org. Retrieved 2024-06-19.
- ^ Have I Got a Story for You: More Than a Century of Fiction from The Forward. W. W. Norton & Company. 2016. ISBN 9780393254853.
- ^ Sherman, Joseph; Estraikh, Gennady, eds. (2007). David Bergelson : From modernism to socialist realism. Legenda. p. 192. ISBN 9781905981120.
- ^ Teller, Judd L. (1968). Strangers and Natives: The Evolution of the American Jew from 1921 to the Present. Delacorte Press. p. 36.
- ^ Howe, Irving (1976). World of Our Fathers. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. p. 533.
- ^ Goodman, Henry, ed. (2001). The New country: stories from the Yiddish about life in America. Judaic traditions in literature, music, and art (1st ed.). Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press. pp. xxvii. ISBN 978-0-8156-0669-7.
- ^ Browne, Lewis (May 2, 1923). "Is Yiddish Literature Dying?". The Nation. 116 (3017): 514.
- ^ a b Schwarz, Jan (2005). Imagining Lives: Autobiographical Fiction of Yiddish Writers. The University of Wisconsin Press. p. 208. ISBN 0299209601.
