Unemployed Yiddish Writers

Born Yosef Tunkel, Der Tunkeler (“the Dark One”) received a traditional education in Bobruisk, Russian Empire (today in Belarus), where his father worked as a melamed. Tunkel attended art school in Vilna on scholarship and began a career as a cartoonist in Odessa. He began contributing short stories, poetry, and caricatures to the Yiddish press around 1901. While living in New York City from 1906 to 1909, Tunkel founded two pathbreaking and irreverent humor magazines: Der kibetser and Der kundes (later changed to Der groyser kundes). Returning to Eastern Europe, Tunkel settled in Warsaw, where he began publishing under the pen name Der Tunkeler. In addition to his career as humor editor for the second main Warsaw daily Der moment, Tunkel compiled more than thirty books, largely collections of his humorous stories and sketches. His oeuvre satirizes the gamut of Jewish social movements and identities in the Yiddish milieu of Eastern Europe, from the pious to the socialist. Tunkel died in New York City after fleeing Warsaw at the outbreak of World War II.