ARN-YITSKHOK
GRODZENSKI (October 19, 1891-1941)
He was born in Vekshne (Viekšniai),
Kovno region, Lithuania. He was
descended from an elite rabbinical pedigree: his grandfather was rabbi in Ivye
(Iwie, Iwye), and his father’s brother was the famed gaon R. Chaim-Ozer
Grodzenski of Vilna. His father also was
an ordained rabbi, but devoted himself to business. A misfortune befell the young Arn-Yitskhok at
his birth: he choked from screaming and fainted, and the town doctor
continuously shook him so that he would return to life, and he thereby so
seriously injured the baby’s vocal chords that he was left with a deformity in
his speech for his entire life. When he
was three years of age, his parents moved with him to Vilna, and he then began
to study in religious primary school, later at age thirteen he entered a
Russian secondary school at which he remained for four or five years. His inexhaustible energy and diligence in
study began to be clear in his school forms.
He read voluminously and early on began to write. At age seventeen he published his first poem
in the Vilna daily newspaper Di yudishe
tsaytung (The Jewish newspaper), edited by Lipman Levin. In 1910 he left for Antwerp, Belgium, where
he mastered the art of polishing diamonds.
He was a cofounder of the local society “Kultur” (Culture), and he later
contributed to Yiddish periodicals that cropped up in those in the smaller
countries of Western Europe, such as: Dos
vokhnblat (The weekly newspaper) in Copenhagen (1911), published by Yoysef
Letitshenski; Der yudisher student
(The Jewish student), a monthly, in Ghent, Belgium (1912); Der mayrev (The West), the first Yiddish newspaper in Antwerp
(starting in January 1913); Der shtern
(The star), a weekly, in Antwerp (from March 1913). In 1913 he returned to Vilna. He contributed to the local daily newspapers Der tog (The day) and Der shtern, as well as to Der fraynd (The friend) in Warsaw. He brought out a Passover news sheet, Friling-kveyten (Spring flowers) and
published his first collection of poetry, entitled Aynzame klangen (Lonely sounds) (Vilna, 1914), 40 pp. During WWI, when the Russians evacuated
Vilna, he left with a tide of homeless people toward Russia, and together with
his parents settled in Ekaterinoslav, Ukraine, where in 1916 he met with a new
and far worse misfortune: he fell under a tramway and lost both feet. For the remainder of his life he would have
to use crutches to move about. This
tragic occurrence overcame him, and it would require even more energy and
perseverance to return to writing. After
the February-March Revolution in 1917, he wrote for various Yiddish newspapers
in Russia, as well as: Folkstsaytung
(People’s newspaper) and Naye tsayt
(Our time) in Kiev; Unzer lebn (Our
life) and Dos naye lebn (The new
life) in Odessa; the anthology Tsukunft
(Future) in Kharkov; and Trep
(Stairs) in Ekaterinoslav, among others.
For the Moscow anthology Fremds
(Abroad), he contributed a series of translations in verse of Goethe, Heine,
Hamsun, Pushkin, Lermontov, Balmont, and Tyutchev, among others. His two longer Pushkin translations appeared
at the time in book form: the poem Poltave
(Poltava) (Kharkov: Yidish, 1919), 71 pp., second improved edition (Vilna,
1923), with a short biography of Pushkin; and the novel Yevgeni onyegin (Evgenii Onegin) (Ekaterinoslav: Visnshaft, 1919),
a second improved edition (Vilna, 1923), 235 pp., with a preface by Grodzenski
on the character of the work. In
accordance with this translation, for the first time this work was staged in
Yiddish in Vilna.
In 1921 he returned to Vilna and
published stories and articles in the local Yiddish newspapers Vilner tog (Vilna day) and Di tsayt (The times), and from to time
in Haynt (Today) and Literarishe bleter (Literary leaves) in
Warsaw. In 1923 he published his novel Lebn (Life) (Vilna: Farlag fun literatn-
un zhurnalistn-fareyn), 122 pp., with a critical preface by Moyshe Shalit—this
would be his most popular and significant work.
It was a subtle, philosophical, meditative, eerily calm, psychological
study, in which the writer in an artistic manner sublimated his own sufferings
and transforms them into a source of creative strength. In the same year, his Muterlekhe gefiln, lebnsshpil in fir bilder (Motherly feelings, a
play from life in four scenes) (Vilna, 1923), 48 pp., appeared. In 1924 he began to publish the afternoon
newspaper Der ovnt-kuryer (The
evening courier), and he edited it until WWII broke out. A lively and none too serious publication, it
quickly reached a printing of 4,5000-5,000 copies, an extremely high number for
Vilna where the ordinary printing in the Yiddish daily until then would never
exceed 1,000-1,200. In those years, he
published the following translations in book form: Jack London’s novel Martin iden (Martin Eden) (Warsaw,
1924), 285 pp.; Maxim Gorky’s novel Foma
gordeyev (Foma Gordeev), with a reprinted, critical appreciation by Pyotr Kogan (Vilna, 1931), 479 pp.; Władysław Kochanowski’s Geshikhte fun a gasn-froy (Story of a
street gal) (Vilna, 1933). In 1934 a
collection of his own stories appeared, entitled In a yidishn dorf (In a Jewish village), depictions of life in a
Jewish rural colony in southern Russia in the first years of the
revolution. In 1939 he edited and
published Vilner almanakh (Vilna
almanac), 366 and 48 pp. This would be
his last literary work. In
January-February 1939, he served two weeks in the famous Lukishker Prison in Vilna
for an article concerning the anti-Jewish student unrest in Poland in November
1936. When the Germans entered Vilna, he
and his wife and children were placed in the Vilna ghetto. According to the description of Sh.
Katsherginski in Khurbn vilne (The
Holocaust in Vilna), Grodzenski’s end came quickly: “In the bloody chaos, 1941,
he attempted to hide until the murderers actually seized him. He resisted and cried out: ‘You won’t take me
alive!’ They beat him, dragged him out
of his home, and threw him in a vehicle which drove to the Ponar the old and
sick who could not make it by foot.
Shortly afterward his wife, a dentist, was killed with two children.”
Sources: Zalmen Reyzen, Leksikon, vol. 1; Shmuel Niger, in Tsukunft (New York) (February 1924; January 1927); Sh.
Katsherginski, Khurbn vilne (New
York, 1947), p. 186; Katsherginski, Tsvishn hamer un serp (Between
hammer and sickle) (Paris, 1949), p. 23; Katsherginski, in Forverts (New York) (August 14, 1949); H.
Abramovitsh, in Unzer shtime (Paris)
(July 13-16, 1951); D. Charney (Tsharni), Vilne
(Vilna) (Buenos Aires, 1951), pp. 244-45; Charney, A litvak in poyln (A Lithuanian in Poland) (New York, 1955), pp. 14,
19, 20.
Yitskhok Kharlash
No comments:
Post a Comment