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Pseudonym of Leivick Halperin, he arrived in America at age 24, after escaping a Czarist sentence after 3 years in Siberia. Much of his poetry, and his "dramatic poems," plays in poetic form, emphasize man's suffering, and Jewish persecution. Leivick's most famous, The Golem, has been produced many times in Yiddish, Hebrew, and English among other languages. (See image below, and click on it to make it larger.) Beginning in the 1920s, he moved closer to the Jewish left and wrote important plays about the sweatshop, and labor movement. In the 1940s and 1950s, his work incorporated more nationalist themes and reflected the great tragedy of the Holocaust. The great pathos of his poetry established him early on as one of the most beloved of the Yiddish poets. One of his poems that are often sung is called "Eybik" [Eternal]. |
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