A Shtetl

Born in Zhelekhov, Russian Empire (today, Żelechów, Poland), Isaac Meir Weissenberg (Veisenberg) was brought up in a working-class family. After receiving a traditional education in heder, he worked as an artisan before coming under the mentorship of Y. L. Peretz. Weissenberg published his first short stories in Peretz’s journal Di yudishe bibliotek (The Jewish Library) in 1904, and in 1906, he put out what would remain his most significant work, a novella entitled A shtetl, in Der veg (The Way), another periodical edited by Peretz. In contrast to the romantic, harmonious portrait of traditional East European Jewish social life in Sholem Asch’s 1904 hit of the same name, Weissenberg’s novella offers a sharp and gritty portrait of the social inequalities and conflicts running through traditional Jewish society, which exploded into the open during the 1905 revolution in Russia. Weissenberg did not repeat this early success, although he wrote a substantial array of interesting Yiddish short stories in a variety of tones. Fostering his own literary circle in interwar Poland, he mentored several rising Yiddish prose writers, including Sh. Horonczyk. He edited the journal Yudishe zamlbikher (Jewish Collections) between 1918 and 1920. And, ever more alienated from the larger Yiddish literary scene, he started his own periodical, Undzer hofenung (Our Hope), in 1926, which he edited until 1932. He died in Warsaw.