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