AVROM SOLOVITSH

AVROM SOLOVITSH (1898-September 1939)

            He was born on an estate near Slomnik (Słomniki), Kielce district, Poland.  He studied with schoolteachers and tutors, later attending a Cracow high school.  For a time he studied humanistic sciences and ancient literature at Cracow University.  In 1927 he moved to Lodz, where he was a manufacturer of silk goods and a devoted friend of Jewish culture and the secular Jewish school curriculum.  He was a close friend of Y. M. Vaysenberg and helped him financially with his literary publications, in which Solovitsh himself began to publish.  He contributed poems and stories to: Inzer hofening (Our hope), Foroys (Onward), and Literarishe bleter (Literary leaves) in Warsaw; and Nayer folksblat (New people’s newspaper) in Lodz; among others.  He was a cofounder of the monthly Os (Letter) in Lodz-Warsaw (1936-1938), in which he published in Yiddish his translations of the ancient Indian Upanishadn un vedn (Upanishads and Vedas), a portion of which was later included in his short book Teg fun gatama (Days of Ghatama) (Lodz, 1936), 44 pp.  He was a contributor to the last Lodz literary journal, Kvaln (Springs) (August 1939).  On the night of September 7-8, 1939, when the Nazis were approaching Lodz, he left the city and was killed on the road by German airplane fire.  His book “Vunderbare noveln” (Wonderful novels) which had already been set in type was lost.

Sources: S. Z. (Zaromb), in Literarishe bleter (Warsaw) (August 7, 1936); Tsukunft (New York) (December 1936); Khayim Leyb Fuks, in Fun noentn over (New York) 3 ( 1957), pp. 263-64; Y. Goldkorn, Lodzher portretn, umgekumene yidishe shrayber un tipn (Portraits of Lodz, murdered Yiddish writers and types) (Tel Aviv: Hamenorah, 1963), pp. 223-25.

Khayim Leyb Fuks