In the Mountains

The poet, novelist, editor, and politician Hersh Dovid Nomberg grew up in a Hasidic family in Amshinov (now Mszczonów, Poland), but suffered a crisis of faith and abandoned his wife and child to settle in Warsaw. There he came under the influence of Y. L. Peretz, lived with fellow young writers Avrom Reisen and Sholem Asch, and made his literary mark with stories of uprooted and directionless young Jewish men that bore comparison with the Hebrew works of contemporaries like Brenner and Feierberg (as in “In the Mountains”). Initially writing in both Hebrew and Yiddish, Nomberg became a committed Yiddishist by 1908, when he advocated for the embrace of Yiddish as Jewry’s national language at the first international conference for the support of Yiddish in Czernowitz. Nomberg’s energies shifted over time from literature to political and cultural activism on behalf of what he called “folkism,” the idea that East European Jews were in essence a diasporic Yiddish nation and should cultivate a secular nationhood in Eastern Europe based on Yiddish culture and far-reaching communal autonomy. During and after World War I, he became active in the Folkspartey, which took up these ideas in the political arena of the newly created Polish state. Nomberg also supported Yiddish secular schools and organizations, promoting their expansion in visits to Argentina, Palestine, and the United States. In the mid-1920s, as hopes for Jewish cultural autonomy in Eastern Europe curdled and the Folkspartey faded, Nomberg was impressed by Jewish colonization projects in Soviet Crimea. He was a frequent contributor to the Warsaw newspaper Moment.