Jewish Folk-Expressions under the Nazi Yoke

Israel Kaplan, the son of a Lithuanian rabbi, was born in Volozhin, Belorussia, and educated in Brisk, Vilna, and Kovno. He spent his early career as a teacher and writer. With the German occupation, Kaplan was confined to the Kovno and Riga ghettos and later sent to Dachau, from where he was liberated in 1945. An early champion of Holocaust testimony and ethnography, he founded and edited Fun letstn khurbn (From the Latest Catastrophe), one of the most important publications to appear in the displaced persons’ camps. In 1949 he settled in Israel, where he continued to publish on the Holocaust. He was awarded the Manger Prize for Yiddish Literature in 1987.