Thursday 22 October 2015

JONAS DAVID

JONAS DAVID (1919-2009)

            He lived in Jassy (Iași), where he was likely born.  During the years of WWII, he published an anthology of Yiddish humor in Romanian (1943, 286 pp.)  He was also the author of a booklet of poems, Biternish, opklangen (Bitterness reverberations) (Jassy, 1945), 15 pp., with drawings by Yeshive Hersh; there were poems about the Jewish massacres at Transnistria.  What is clear from the poems is that the author lived under the German occupation and that his father and brothers “died, having suffocated in the cattle cars between Jassy and Kalarash” (Cǎlǎrași).
(N.B. Further information provided by Joseph Galron-Goldschläger: David survived the war, emigrated to Israel in 1949, where he continued his studies begun earlier at the University of Bucharest.  He taught at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and at Tel Aviv University.  He wrote Hebrew poetry himself and did research in Hebrew literature, in particular the work of Sh. Agnon.)


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