KH.-L. SAYMON

KH.-L. SAYMON (April 1896-July 16, 1945)

            He was born in Kelm (Kelmė), Lithuania, into a devout home (his grandfather was the rabbi of Lukniv).  He studied in religious elementary school and in a yeshiva.  He came to the United States in 1910.  He settled in Chicago and there he began to write.  He published poetry with philosophical content in: Idisher rekord (Jewish record), Idisher kuryer (Jewish courier), Idisher kemfer (Jewish fighter), Indritses yontef bleter (Indrits’s holiday leaves), the journal Shikago (Chicago), and elsewhere.  His books include: Lider (Poetry), illustrations by Todres Geler (Chicago: Ceshensky, 1934), 125 pp.; A vinkl in der velt (A corner of the world) (Chicago, 1946), 148 pp.  He died in Chicago.  As B. Rivkin put it:

Kh. L. Saymon had his own poetic experience….  The heart of the book lies in his poems, which attempt to give expression and form to that experience of his….  Saymon had a sense that man is a partner to God in the Creation of the world, and he must rise to the task all the more.  This was Saymon’s basic truth.  Here was his sense of life and of the world; his heart fantasized here, he dreamt.  Here was the share of divine spirit that Saymon felt in himself, and he endeavored to find the appropriate words to capture his bit of inspiration in an encircling web….  People recognize one without the other—with some sort of an ardor beckoning from their eyes—that they were present when the world was created—the world with them together; and they rummage in Creation to find their whole shape, as God conceived them; for they sense this strongly as well as their own deficiency….  This was not an idea unique to Saymon, but the very essence of his life sensation which he sought in all manner to convey; from this essential point he drew all his better poems, and the better lines in the not so good poems.

Sources: L. Mishkin, Defus shikago beivrit vebeyidish (Hebrew and Yiddish printing in Chicago) (1951/1952); B. Rivkin, in Shikago (Chicago) (1934), pp. 31-35; Y. Botoshanski, in Di prese (Buenos Aires) (May 9, 1935).

Leyb Vaserman