YOYSEF VITLIN

YOYSEF VITLIN (b. ca. 1815)

            He lived in Lemberg, Galicia.  He was a pioneer of modern Yiddish literature and of the Enlightenment movement in Galicia.  He translated from German and French into archaicized Yiddish a variety of stories which he made a bit more Jewish and a bit more familiar, among them: Daniel Defoe’s Robinzohn kruzo, di geshikhte fun alter-leb, eyne vare un vunderbare geshikhte tsum lezen (Robinson Crusoe, the story of Alter Leb, a true and wonderful story to read), part 1, 66 pp., part 2, 113 pp. (Lemberg, 1843), with a preface and in their “place fine pictures, which will afford the reader a powerfully intriguing and delightful impression.”  This was the first publication of “Robinson Crusoe” in Yiddish.  In his preface, Vitlin wrote, inter alia: “Jewish children, all of them our brethren, know that throughout the entire world man is the most beautiful and best, most intelligent and most ideal creature, because God gave him a soul which lives forever, a great wonder, however foolish the body and however noble and delicate the soul, they grown old into one another amicably and brotherly, such that each is indispensable to the other.”  This work was republished in many editions in Poland and Russia.

Source: Zalmen Reyzen, in Yivo-bleter (Vilna) (November-December 1938), p. 588.

Khayim Leyb Fuks