Salomón Brainsky

Salomón (also known as Shloyme) Brainsky was born in Zelechów, Poland. He was an enthusiastic Zionist, but after a trip to Palestine he became disillusioned, complaining that Yiddish had been shunned there. Fleeing Nazi persecution in 1934, Brainsky emigrated to Bogotá, Colombia. His stories, written in Yiddish, reflected his own situation as a struggling Jewish immigrant, eking out a living as a door-to-door peddler of fabrics. Gentes en la Noria: Cuentos bogotanos, published in 1945, was a loose translation of his stories by Colombian poet Luis Vidales. The protagonists are the poor and the marginalized, immigrants who arrive under duress in a strange land whose language they do not understand and who suffer nostalgia for the places and people they left behind.