Cain and Abel

Itzik Manger was born Isidor Helfer in Czernowitz (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine). He attended a heder and did not finish his gymnasium studies. During World War I, his family moved to Iaşi, Romania, where Manger began writing Yiddish verse. After serving in the war, he lived in Bucharest, where he wrote journalism and lectured on folklore. His literary career began in the early 1920s, under the mentorship of Eliezer Shteynbarg. Manger arrived in Warsaw in 1928 and spent a prolific decade there, writing and reciting poetry, composing lyrics for cabaret and film, writing and staging plays, as well as publishing multiple collections and periodicals, including two modernist revisions of Jewish biblical folklore: Khumesh-lider (Songs of the Pentateuch) and Megile-lider (Songs of the Megillah). He left Poland for Paris in 1938, moved to New York in 1951, and finally settled in Israel in 1958.