Boris Kletzkin

The only child of wealthy parents, Boris Arkadevich Kletzkin was born in Horodishche, Russian Empire (today in Belarus) and received a traditional Jewish education as well as secular tutoring. In his youth, his family moved to Vilna, and Kletzkin embarked on a career in Yiddish publishing. A supporter of The Bund, he helped establish The Bund’s central publishing house and its main organs, Der veker and Di folks-tsaytung. Deeply devoted to the Yiddishist idea of creating a new secular Yiddish high culture, in 1910 Kletzkin founded his own publishing company devoted to that ideal and the Kletzkin Farlag in Vilna immediately became the premiere publishing house for Yiddish secular literature, scholarship, and children’s literature—attainments embodied in the premiere Yiddishist “thick journal” of the prewar era Di yudishe velt, the pioneering Yiddish scholarly anthology Der pinkes, and the premiere Yiddish children’s journal Grininke boymelekh [beymelekh]. Although his activities were interrupted by World War I, he refounded the Kletzkin Farlag after the war and devoted the rest of his life and much of his own personal wealth to Yiddish literary publishing in Vilna and Warsaw. Kletzkin’s influence on Yiddish letters was profound, and important works of Yiddish literature continued to appear under his name even after his death.