VOLF KARMYOL (WOLF KARMIOL)

VOLF KARMYOL (WOLF KARMIOL) (b. October 30, 1914)

            He was a storyteller, born in Lodz.  He graduated from a Polish Hebrew high school and received his Master of Philosophy degree in Warsaw.  Over the years 1936-1938, he studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  He survived the Lodz ghetto and in 1947 emigrated to the United States where he worked as a teacher in Jewish schools in Philadelphia, Detroit, and New York.  From 1971 he was living in Israel.  He debuted in print in 1946 with a story in Dos naye lebn (The new life) in Lodz.  He wrote—mostly stories concerned with the Holocaust—for: Tsukunft (Future), Idisher kemfer (Jewish fighter), Forverts (Forward), and Tog (Day)—in New York; and Unzer shtime (Our voice) and Videroyfboy (Reconstruction)—in Paris; among others.  In book form: Vegener tsien tsum sof velt, dertseylungen (Carts drawn to the end of the world, stories) (Tel Aviv: Hamenorah, 1968), 296 pp.  Almost all of the stories in this book appeared in English under the overall title of Hersh and Miriam and Other Stories, trans. Esther Zweig (Tel Aviv, 1973), 291 pp.  He later published Der koridor, dertseylungen (The corridor, stories) (Tel Aviv: Yisorel-bukh, 1985), 205 pp.  “Characteristic of all of Karmyol’s stories,” wrote Y. Yanasovitsh, “is…[that] over his figures, and mainly in themselves, hovers the dread of those who have glimpsed death.”

Sources: Y. Trunk, Lodzher geto, a historishe un sotsyologishe shtudye mit dokumentn, tabeles un mape (The Lodz ghetto, a historical and sociological study with documents, tables, and maps) (New York: YIVO, 1962), see index; Y. Kahan, in Tsukunft (New York) 10 (1968); Khayim Leyb Fuks, Lodzh shel mayle, dos yidishe gaystiḳe un derhoybene lodzh, 100 yor yidishe un oykh hebreishe literatur un kultur in lodzh un in di arumiḳe shtet un shtetlekh (Lodz on high, the Jewish spiritual and elevated Lodz, 100 years of Yiddish and also Hebrew literature and culture in Lodz and in the surrounding cities and towns) (Tel Aviv: Perets Publ., 1972), pp. 309-11; Y. Yanasovitsh, Penemer un nemen (Faces and names), vol. 2 (Buenos Aires, 1972), pp. 251-68; Yerusholaimer almanakh 6/7 (1976).

Yekhezkl Lifshits

[Additional information from: Berl Kagan, comp., Leksikon fun yidish-shraybers (Biographical dictionary of Yiddish writers) (New York, 1986), col. 552.]