ZALMEN-PINKHES (SOLOMON P.) NATHANS

ZALMEN-PINKHES (SOLOMON P.) NATHANS (b. 1893)

            He was born in Vorne (Varniai), Kovno district, Lithuania, where his father was rabbi.  In his youth he immigrated to the United States with his father.  He studied with his father, in a yeshiva, in a high school, and later graduated from New York University.  From the mid-1920s, he worked as a teacher of mathematics and physics at a middle school in New York.  He was the author of textbooks in English.  In Yiddish he published: Populere erklehrung fun aynshteyns relativitet-teorye, mit a baylage iber khemye un astronomye (Popular explanation of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, with a supplement on chemistry and astronomy) (New York, 1931), 175 pp., with a preface in which he recounts his linguistic difficulties writing in Yiddish explanations of Einstein’s theory.  The four supplements to the book: (1) an overview of matter; (2) organic creatures; (3) on the heavens and the stars; and (4) the nebula system in our solar system, as well as technical notes and terminology of the corresponding technical and mathematical expressions in Yiddish, which were later used by the Groyser verterbukh funder yidisher shprakh (Great dictionary of the Yiddish language), vol. (New York, 1961).  In the 1930s he lived in New Rochelle, near New York City.  Further biographical information remains unknown.

Khayim Leyb Fuks