In the Tower

Born Yehoyesh-Shloyme (Solomon) Blumgarten to a religious family in the shtetl of Virbaln in the Russian Empire (today Virbalis, Lithuania), Yehoash was exposed to maskilic texts through his father, a member of the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement. As a teenager, Yehoash wrote poems in Hebrew and worked as a private Hebrew tutor. In 1890, he immigrated to New York and worked in a number of trades, but in 1900, he transferred to the Jewish Consumptives Relief Society sanitarium in Denver for tuberculosis treatment. While there, he devoted himself fully to his Yiddish writing, which he had been publishing in New York Yiddish papers since 1891. A prolific writer whose poems and essays were widely published in Yiddish periodicals around the globe, Yehoash helped pioneer a new tone in Yiddish poetry marked by lyricism, stillness, attention to the wonders and beauty of nature, and spiritual searching. Though biblical motifs and Jewish national themes characterized much of his work, Yehoash was also more willing to free his work from these intertexts than most of his immediate contemporaries, as in “Among the Trees.” Yehoash’s most famous and lasting achievement was and remains his project to translate the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) into a supple, rich, literary Yiddish, a project that consumed most of his energies for years. Yehoash’s Yiddish Tanakh (1936) was only one of his many translations into Yiddish, which included Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, part of the Koran, and Pirke Avot (Di leren fun di foters, 1912). In 1914, Yehoash visited Palestine and was inspired to write Fun Nyu-York biz Reḥovot un tsurik (1917), a three-volume work describing the country and his trip, later popularized in English translation as The Feet of the Messenger (1923).