L. GORELIK

L. GORELIK (December 8, 1889-October 27, 1941)

            He was born in Žlobin, Byelorussia.  Until age twelve he studied in religious primary school, thereafter for two years in a yeshiva.  He also studied Russian.  At age seventeen he emigrated to the United States.  He worked under difficult conditions until the end of his life at various trades.  From 1911 he published poems in Fraye arbeter shtime (Free voice of labor), Tsukunft (Future), in the collection Fun mentsh tsu mentsh (From person to person), in Mani Leyb’s anthology Nyu York (New York), and in other publications.  As an active representative of the group of young poets in Chicago, he published in the anthology Yung shikago (Young Chicago) and in the journal Ineynem (Altogether), issue 6-1, a cycle of poems which linked him to the Introspectivists (Inzikhstn).  He expressed in these poems the spirit of pain and despair at the harsh economic and political conditions of Jews in the old country, as well as due to their national/ethnic decline in the new world.  He later published poems on labor themes in Frayhayt (Freedom) and Hamer (Hammer).  Among his books: Lider (Poems), published by the literary-dramatic society of Cleveland (1919), 168 pp.; Oys dzhou, vider yoshe (Chicago, 1936), stories, 24 pp.; Arum unz (Around us), poems (Chicago: Reuven Brainin IKUF Club, 1941), 125 pp.  He died in Chicago.

Sources: Zalmen Reyzen, Leksikon, vol. 1; Bal-Makhshoves, in Morgn-zhurnal (December 3, 1922); D. Kurland and S. Rokhkind, Di haynttsaytike proletarishe yidishe dikhtung in amerike (The contemporary proletariat Yiddish poetry in America) (Minsk, 1932); Alexander Pomerants, in Proletpen (Kiev, 1935), pp. 200-1; Pomerants, in Yidishe kultur (New York) (October-November 1941); Amerike in yidishn vort (America in the Yiddish word), an anthology (New York, 1955), pp. 462-64.

Alexander Pomerants