A Youth from Prague among the Chassidim

Born into an acculturated Prague merchant family and educated in Czech schools, Jirí Langer shocked his friends and family when, in the summer of 1913, he settled in Belz (eastern Galicia) at the court of the Belzer rebbe to immerse himself fully in the life of what he considered authentic Judaism. In 1918, he left the Belz court and, after studying at the Hebrew Pedagogical Institute in Vienna for several months, returned to Prague. He was part of the circle of Jewish intellectuals around Franz Kafka and Max Brod. In 1919, he began to publish articles in Hebrew, German, and Czech that combined his unique synthesis of Talmud, Kabbalah, Hasidism, Freudian theory, and European literature. His Hebrew poetry, which drew on medieval liturgical poetry, was daring in its blatantly homosexual references. In 1939, he escaped from Nazi-occupied Prague to the Land of Israel, after which he wrote almost exclusively in Hebrew. He was the brother of the well-known Czech writer František Langer.