YEHUDA-LEYB GAMZU

YEHUDA-LEYB GAMZU (b. December 16, 1870)

            He was born in Dvinsk (Daugavpils, Dinaburg), Russia.  His father Mortkhe-Ber was a Hebrew writer, a contributor to Hamelits (The advocate), Hatsfira (The siren), and Hayom (Today), and a founder of the “Ḥoveve Tsiyon” (Lovers of Zion) group in Dvinsk.  His son Yehuda-Leyb showed great ability to study and to write while quite young.  He initially studied Jewish subject matter, later taking up a secular education, reading a great deal in Russian and German while studying French and Latin as well.  At age sixteen (1886), he published his first article in Hamelits, and from then on he wrote a great deal for Hatsfira, Hayom, and other serials.  During the 1890s he brought out in book form in Hebrew, among others: Abrabanel (Warsaw, 1894), 114 pp., a poem adapted from the Russian, whose original author was Moyshe Khashkes; Ezra, o shivat tsiyon (Ezra, or the return to Zion), a poem (Nezhin, 1898), 95 pp.; translations from Shakespeare’s King Lear and Nikolai Minsky’s The Siege of Tulchin; Tsidkiyahu (Zedekiah), a poem.  He also wrote in Yiddish, and in Y. L. Peretz’s Di yudishe biblyotek (The Yiddish library) 1 (1890) and 2 (1891) in Warsaw, he published a long poem: “Yosl berls un yosl shmayes” (Yosl, son or Ber, and Yosl, son of Shmaye), and two shorter poems, “A yud” (A Jew) and “Nokh hayne” (After Heine).  The longer poem drew the attention of Leo Wiener who, in his book The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century, who attributed it to Peretz, but in the anthology it is signed with Gamzu’s full name.  The poem itself—four sections with an introduction, 103 four-line stanzas—recounts the story of two friends: “Yosl, son of Berl, and Yosl, son of Shmaye, / The two of them just like brothers, / Same in height, same in age, / Two friends cut from the same mold.”  They go off on different paths in life: one heads off on a well-worn route, becomes a rabbi, and remains “with the difficult, arduous questions of the great Yore dea,”[1] while the other kept posing questions, wanting to understand everything, and left to study in senior high schools and universities, graduating a doubter, disappointed and persecuted.  The poem excelled in the epic quality of its tone, the ease and naturalness of its verses, the richness and folkishness of its language; even today it is a pleasure to read it.  It was later republished in M. Basin’s Antologye (Anthology) together with his “A yud” which was accompanied by the comment that “not one Yiddish reader or even writer could memorize it.”  Regrettably, we do not know what happened to Gamzu after the 1890s.  Most recently, his name was mentioned in Di goldene keyt (The golden chain) in Tel Aviv, in connection with a revived polemical discussion vis-à-vis Yiddish literature, first published in the columns of Hamelits (St. Petersburg, 1889), which included—in addition to Sholem-Aleykhem, A. L. Levinski, and Y. Kh. Ravnitski—an article by Gamzu entitled “Teshuva kahalakha” (The proper response).

Sources: Zalmen Reyzen, Leksikon, vol. 1; Bentsiyon Ayzenshtat, Dor rabanav vesofrav (A generation of rabbis and writers), vol. 1 (Warsaw, 1895), p. 14; Kh. H. Maslyanski, in Morgn-zhurnal (New York) (October 21, 1932); Kh. D. Fridberg, in Bet eked sefarim (Tel Aviv) 1 (1952), p. 12, 2 (1954), p. 781; G. Kreser, in Di goldene keyt 20 (1954); Leo Wiener, The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1899), pp. 113-14.

Yitskhok Kharlash

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[1] One of the four sections of the Shulḥan aruch (Set table), the massive compendium of Jewish law.