Zishe Landau (1889–1937)

Alexander "Zishe" Landau was born to a distinguished Jewish rabbinical family in Plotsk, Poland. He was orphaned in childhood and grew up at the court of his grandfather, Rabbi Zeev Wolf Landau of Strikov. Landau received both a traditional Jewish and a secular education. In 1906, at age 17, he immigrated to the USA, settling in New York City. There he helped create the avant-garde Yiddish literary group, Di Yunge. He later rejected his early poems, written in a traditional style, and recognized as genuine only those written after 1911, when he came under the influence of European Impressionism and the credo of "art-for-art's-sake." He was deeply affected by Jewish suffering in World War I, and reverted to Jewish national themes and also wrote patriotic American poems. Most popular was his poem "Ba'al Shem," about the Jewish mystic rabbi, whom he depicted as always finding a cheerful aspect in nature and in life. He edited the anthology Di Idishe Dikhtung in Amerike biz Yohr 1919 (Anthology: Yiddish Poetry in America until 1919), and wrote the introduction. In 1925-1926, he was co-editor with Reuben Iceland and Mani Leib of Der Inzl (The Island), one the principle anthologies of Di Yunge. In his four comedies, published under the collective title Es Iz Gornisht Nit Geshen (Nothing Happened, 1937), Landau employed masks to satirize human beings and human relations. His translations of early English ballads and of German, Russian, and French poets were posthumously collected and published in the volume Fun der Velt-Poezye (From World Poetry, 1947).