Abraham Jacob Paperna

A poet and literary critic, Abraham Jacob (Avraham Ya‘akov) Paperna was born and raised in Kapyl, present-day Belarus, and embraced the Haskalah from an early age, though he came to observe the movement critically and allegorically in his writings. In the 1860s, he studied at rabbinical seminaries in Zhitomir and Vilna, and then spent his career teaching at the Jewish government school in Zakroczym, Poland, and at the government secondary school in Plock. An integral member of the Russian Haskalah, he wrote poems, both lyrical and satirical. Paperna died in Odessa, where he had fled during World War I.