YOYSEF SIKOLER (SIKULER)

YOYSEF SIKOLER (SIKULER) (1907-October 1954)

            He was born in Ludmir (Volodymyr Volyns’kyi; Pol., Włodzimierz), Poland.  He studied law at Vilna University.  He was active in student circles and lectured on philosophical and social themes.  He composed poetry in Yiddish and Hebrew.  During WWII he was a refugee in Soviet Russia, and there he contracted a severe lung ailment.  In 1952 he made aliya to the state of Israel and died two years later.  “In his poems he expresses,” wrote Mortkhe Kroshnits, “the terrible sufferings of a man whose fate sentences him to many years glued to his sick bed and waiting inevitable death….  But in the darkness of extinguished life’s light, he finds comfort and hope in the divine light that shines for him and rules his entire being.”  His biography and a selection of his poetry were published in the anthology Haifa, yorbukh far literatur un kunst (Haifa, yearbook for literature and art), edited by Mortkhe Kroshnits and Dovid Radin (Haifa: Haifa division of the Yiddish writers’ and journalists’ association, 1963), pp. 141-50.