YITSKHOK BERKMAN

YITSKHOK BERKMAN

His family came from Lithuania.  He lived in Lodz and Warsaw.  He was a Hebrew-Yiddish writer, pedagogue, and teacher, and he was connected with the early Zionists (Ḥoveve-tsiyon) in Lodz.  In the years 1910-1911 he was in Palestine, and later he was back in Lodz where he lived until 1922—thereafter, in Warsaw where he was a Zionist activist and a teacher in a Hebrew high school.  He wrote Hebrew school textbooks and staged stories for children.  In 1910 he published in Lodzher tageblat (Lodz daily newspaper) “Mayn rayze kin erets yisroel” (My trip to Palestine), chapters from a diary, which was one of the first Palestine travel narratives in the Yiddish press.  He later wrote about education in Lodzher tageblat, Folksblat (People’s newspaper), and Der yidisher zhurnalist (The Jewish journalist) in Lodz (1919), among others.  He was the author of: Tal boker (Dew of morning), a Hebrew-language textbook (Warsaw, 1908), 116 pp.; Moshe (Moses), a biblical drama for children in four acts (Lemberg, 1919), 70 pp.  He also published, together with Yitskhok Katsenelson, the Hebrew-language textbook Sefat ami (The language of my people) (Warsaw, 1913/1914), 114 pp.; Tsafirim (Zephyrs) (Warsaw, 1925), 173 pp.; and in Yiddish, Ilustrirte khumesh (Illustrated Pentateuch), among others.

Source: Tsipora Katsenelson-Nakhimov, Yitskhok Katsenelson (Buenos Aires, 1948), pp. 156-58, 183-84, 189.