David Frishman

Born in Zgierz in the Russian Empire (today in Poland) and brought up in nearby Łódź, David Frishman (often transliterated Frischmann) received an excellent traditional education supplemented by private, secular instruction. Frishman’s first Hebrew stories were published when he was just sixteen. He gained equal fame in Eastern Europe’s emerging modern Hebraist cultural milieu as an essayist, literary critic, poet, prose writer, uncompromising editor, and translator of European works into Hebrew from many languages. At the center of his work in all those realms were the intertwined convictions that the Hebrew language itself had to be at the heart of any Jewish nationhood worthy of continuation, that Hebrew culture had to undergo a renaissance wherein traditional commentaries and religious texts would be supplanted by works of literary art in a European mode, that Jewish consciousness itself had to be regenerated and Jews once again made “creative people,” that this could only happen through the creation and consumption of art-literature and aesthetic experience, and that only a compelling modern Hebrew culture had any chance to hold on to a younger readership amid ongoing and irreversible assimilation. Although Frishman’s Hebraism was all-encompassing and his attitudes toward Yiddish and the Yiddish literary revival largely negative, he did compose several important works of modern poetry in Yiddish, particularly in the 1890s. Before World War I, Frishman was largely based in Warsaw, where he led a lively literary salon. A demanding editor of many important Hebrew journals over the years, his greatest editorial achievement consisted in his work from 1917 until his death as editor for the unprecedentedly ambitious and well-funded Stybel Hebrew publishing house and its influential Hebrew literary quarterly Ha-Tekufah; in both those venues, Frishman was given free hand to pursue his longstanding vision of creating a properly European Hebrew literature through large-scale programmatic literary translation as well as original literary creativity. Ironically, Frishman’s most significant literary writing in both prose and poetry dealt with traditional Jewish topoi and settings.