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The Yiddish poet and prose writer Isaiah Spiegel was born in 1906 in Baluty (Łódź, Poland) to a family of modest means. He received a traditional heder education and later attended the secular Yiddish Jewish folkshul prior to receiving his teacher training. Spiegel continued to write while in the Łódź ghetto, where his poems, set to music, were widely sung. Deported first to Auschwitz and later to a labor camp in Saxony, Spiegel retrieved his buried ghetto writings after the war and published them in revised form. Spiegel headed the Polish Yiddish Writers Association from 1948 to 1951, when he immigrated to Israel.