Jacob Glatstein

Jacob Glatstein was a Polish -born American poet and literary critic who wrote in the Yiddish language. He is also known as Yankev Glatshteyn and as Jacob Glatshteyn . Although his family was an Enlightened religious family, he received a traditional education until the age of 16 and an introduction of modern Yiddish literature. He immigrated to New York City in 1914 where his uncle lived due to the increasing anti-semitism in Lublin. He worked in sweatshops while studying English. He started to study law at New York University in 1918. He married in 1919. He worked briefly at teaching before switching to journalism. In 1920 he helped to establish the Inzikhist or In Zikh (Introspectivist) literary movement, rejecting metered verse and declaring that non-Jewish themes were a valid topic for Yiddish poetry. His books of poetry include Jacob Glatshteyn (1921) and A Jew from Lublin (1966). He was also a regular contributor to the New York Yiddish daily Morgen-Zhurnal and the Yiddisher Kemfer in which he published a weekly column entitled "In Tokh Genumen" (The Heart of the Matter). He was interested in exotic themes, in poems that emphasized the sound of words, and later, as the Holocaust loomed and then took place, in re-appropriations of Jewish tradition. He became known for passionate poems written in response to the Holocaust , but many of his poems also evoke golden memories and thoughts about eternity. He won acclaim only later in life, winning the Louis Lamed Prize in 1940 for his works of prose and again in 1956 for a volume of collected poems titled "From All My Toil". He was an outstanding figure of mid-20th-century American Yiddish literature .¹