Leo Wiener

Born in Białystok, Leo Wiener entered the University of Warsaw in 1880 and subsequently studied at the University of Berlin. He immigrated to the United States in 1882, settling for a time in Kansas City, Missouri. After working as a lecturer at the University of Kansas, Wiener accepted a post in Harvard University’s Department of Slavic Studies. An extraordinary polyglot, he grew interested for a brief time in the new Yiddish secular-modern literature developing in Eastern Europe and the United States despite his distance from any substantial Jewish communal affiliation. In 1899, after a tour collecting Yiddish literary materials in Eastern Europe, Wiener published the first English-language scholarly work about modern Yiddish literature, The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century. He also translated a volume of poetry by Morris Rosenfeld into English, helping to win wide recognition for the so-called poet of the sweatshops beyond Yiddish radical circles. Wiener’s collection of Yiddish books served as the core of the collection of rare Yiddish volumes held at Harvard’s library. In addition to his work in Yiddish studies, he translated Leo Tolstoy into English and wrote philological studies concerning pre-Columbian societies in the Americas, arguing that African explorers arrived in certain parts of the Americas decades earlier than Christopher Columbus. He was the father of Norbert Wiener, a pioneer of cybernetics.