MOYSHE EFRON

MOYSHE EFRON (1883-May 5, 1944)

            He was born in the town of Luna, near Grodno.  As a child he moved with his parents to Warsaw.  At age twelve or thirteen, he wrote and published a short composition and presented it to his father as a gift.  Around this time, he abandoned yeshiva and began to write stories.  H. D. Nomberg, Avrom Reyzen, Zalmen Shneur, Yankev Glatshteyn, and others encouraged himself strongly to write.  In 1903 he came to the United States.  He studied for a year at Long Island Medical School.  He later moved to Paris and took a course at the Sorbonne, but he did not complete it.  He returned to America and took up teaching, and he remained a teacher until the end of his life.  He died in New York.  After his death, one of his stories, “Der sod” (The secret), was published in Idisher kemfer (Jewish fighter) in New York.  His widow, Leye Efron, and a group of friends published his stories that had never been published in his lifetime as a book entitled Tsvishn shotns un andere dertseylungen (Among shadows and other stories) (New York, 1945), 432 pp.

Sources: A. Beyzer, in Tsukunft (New York) (August 1946); Avrom Reyzen, in Di feder (New York) (1949).

Khayim Leyb Fuks