Zalman Shneour

Hailed by Chaim Nahman Bialik as the future of Hebrew poetry when he was still a teenager, Zalman Shneour was a prolific, popular, and influential poet and writer in both Yiddish and Hebrew. Born in Shklov (today in Belarus), Shneour moved to Odessa, to Vilna, and then to Western Europe. His poetic style matured and evolved over the first few decades of the twentieth century, shifting from short lyric musings to epic explorations of philosophy and Jewish fate in quasi-prophetic tones. After publishing several multivolume poetry collections in the early 1920s, Shneour tried to settle in Palestine but, unimpressed by the lukewarm reception he received in Tel Aviv, moved to Paris in 1923; he lived there until the Nazi invasion of France in 1940. The late 1920s were marked by a shift in his literary production to focus more on Yiddish prose (which he translated and later revised into Hebrew) than on Hebrew poetry. In the next three decades, Shneour published dozens of prose volumes in Yiddish and Hebrew, focusing primarily on Jewish life in Belarus from the eighteenth century to the modern period. Working in this genre, he gained a large and enthusiastic American Yiddish-newspaper readership and was able to sustain a comfortable lifestyle. Escaping Europe in 1941, he split his final years between the United States and Israel. Shneour was awarded the Israel Prize for literature in 1955.