EMANUEL GOLDSHMIDT

EMANUEL GOLDSHMIDT (ca. 1913-1943)

            He was born in Vilna, son of the Jewish writer Elye-Yankev Goldshmidt.  He graduated from a Polish Jewish secular high school, was a member of the Zionist Youth Organization, and had little contact with the youth in the secular Jewish school at which his father was a teacher.  His promising poems began to appear in Tsukunft (Future) in New York and in the Zionist daily newspaper Tsayt (Time) in Vilna.  He suffered greatly under the Nazi occupation.  In 1943 his mother died from hunger in the Vilna ghetto, after which he died alone.  His few published poems ring like an epitaph to his young, destroyed life.