My First Day in the Twentieth Century

Melekh Ravitch

1962

The truth, the mathematical truth, is that a new century begins on January 1 of the year one of the new hundred-year time span. But it is the custom to celebrate a new century on January 1 of the last year of the departing century, a year earlier. People are tired of dragging around a worn-out century and wish as quickly as possible to start the…

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Creator Bio

Melekh Ravitch

1893–1976
Modernist Yiddish poet, essayist, vegetarian, and cultural icon Melekh Ravitch (born Zekharye-Khone Bergner) was born in Radymno, Galicia (now Poland). He served in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I and moved to Warsaw in 1921, where he and the poets Uri Zvi Greenberg and Peretz Markish established the expressionist literary group called Di Khalyastre (The Gang). From 1924 to 1934, Ravitch was the executive secretary of the Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists in Warsaw, at 13 Tłomackie Street, which later inspired his biographical sketches of twentieth-century Yiddish writers. Ravitch, a world traveler, ultimately settled in Montreal in 1940, where he perfected the genre of the autobiographical vignette.

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