Jacob Glatstein

Jacob Glatstein was a Polish-born American poet and literary critic who wrote in the Yiddish language. He was born 1896 August 20 in Lublin, Poland and died 1971 November 19 in New York City, New York, U.S.A. He is also known as Yankev Glatshteyn. He immigrated to the United States in 1914 due to the increasing anti-semitism in Lublin. He worked in sweatshops while studying English. He started to study law at New York University in 1918. He married in 1919. He worked briefly at teaching before switching to journalism. In 1920 he helped to establish the Inzikhist or In Zikh (Introspectivist) literary movement, rejecting metered verse and declaring that non-Jewish themes were a valid topic for Yiddish poetry. He was interested in exotic themes, in poems that emphasized the sound of words, and later, as the Holocaust loomed and then took place, in reappropriations of Jewish tradition. He became known for passionate poems written in response to the Holocaust, but many of his poems also evoke golden memories and thoughts about eternity. He won acclaim only later in life. He was an outstanding figure of mid-20th-century American Yiddish literature.

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