Zishe Landau

Born in Plotsk in Russian Poland (today Płock, Poland) into a Hasidic family—his father was a scion of the Tshekhanover and Strikover rebbes—Zishe Landau received a traditional religious education that his stepmother supplemented with a secular education. After two years in Vilna, where Landau drew close to The Bund, he immigrated to New York in 1906 with his uncle. Turning to Yiddish poetry in 1907, Landau, with Mani Leib, Reuven Iceland, and Yosef Rolnik cofounded the Yiddish poetic movement Di Yunge in pursuit of a vision of Yiddish poetry liberated from narrow social and political agendas and free to explore art, irony, and beauty. Landau’s own verse was often dominated by irony and a posture of insouciance, but one of his most widely appreciated poems was, ironically, about the great mystic and fabled founder of the Hasidic movement the Ba‘al Shem Tov. In addition to poetry, Landau wrote prose, essays, and plays, and translated Heinrich Heine and others into Yiddish.