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Born in 1880 to a family of flour millers outside of Kleshtshel (Kleszczele), a town then part of the Russian Empire and now in northeast Poland, Peretz Hirshbein was a Yiddish playwright, novelist, journalist, travel writer, and stage director whose work was pivotal to the development of Yiddish theater in the early twentieth century. The rustic setting of his youth provided the backdrop for much of his writing, including his two-part memoir, My Childhood Years, and a series of naturalistic plays he wrote in the 1910s that are considered masterpieces of the genre. Hirshbein spent twenty years traveling the world together with his wife, Esther Shumiatcher-Hirshbein, whom he married in 1918. In the mid-1930s, the couple settled in Los Angeles, where Hirshbein died in 1948.
About the author
Joel Berkowitz is Professor of English and Director of the Sam & Helen Stahl Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. A historian of the Yiddish theater and translator of Yiddish drama, he is the author of Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage, editor of Yiddish Theatre: New Approaches, and co-editor of Landmark Yiddish Plays and Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage. He is the co-founder of the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project, an international research group dedicated to studying, preserving, and teaching about the rich cultural legacy of the Yiddish stage.
Peretz Hirshbein (1880-1948) was a Yiddish playwright, novelist, journalist, travel writer, and theater director whose work was pivotal to the development of Yiddish theater in the early twentieth century. After visiting New York around 1912, Hirshbein spent much of the next twenty years traveling the world together with his wife, Esther Shumiatcher-Hirshbein, whom he married in 1918. In the mid-1930s, the couple settled in Los Angeles, where Hirshbein died of Lou Gehrig's disease in 1948.
Leonard Wolf (1923-2019) was a poet, author, teacher, and translator. Born in Vulcan, Romania, Wolf immigrated to the United States in 1930 with his family. He began writing poetry in his teens while attending public school and served in the U.S. Army during World War II. After earning his PhD in English and creative writing, Wolf taught English literature at several colleges and universities and authored twenty-seven books, including his own novels and poetry collections. He became particularly renowned as a translator of Yiddish literature and published a Yiddish version of Winnie the Pooh.
