Perets Hirshbeyn

Perets Hirshbeyn (Peretz Hirschbein) was born and raised near Grodno in the Russian Empire (today in Belarus). After a traditional education, Hirshbeyn began his literary career in Vilna as a Hebrew writer. His 1905 play Miriam, which treated themes of poverty, urban life, and prostitution in frank terms, is considered the first work of naturalist drama in Hebrew; his 1906 Olamot bodedim is similarly considered the pioneering work of symbolist drama in Hebrew. In the same period, under the influence of Y. L. Peretz, Hirshbeyn shifted decisively to Yiddish-language writing, pioneering naturalist and symbolist drama in that language as well. In 1908, he moved to Odessa, where he came under the influence of Chaim Nahman Bialik and founded one of the first theater troupes devoted to the staging of serious literary drama in Yiddish, known as the Hirshbeyn Trupe. After the troupe disbanded in 1910, Hirshbeyn wrote in quick succession a series of four Yiddish plays—A farvorfn vinkl (1912), Di puste kretshme (1913), Dem shmids tekhter (1918), and the famous Grine felder (1918, later adapted as one of the triumphs of Yiddish film in 1937)—that found warm, moving realist drama in rural Jewish life. These works became staples of the serious Yiddish dramatic repertoire in the years that followed. Resettling in New York during these fruitful years, Hirshbeyn also began to travel widely and incessantly with his wife the Yiddish poet Esther Shumiatsher-Hirshbein, and, beginning with an important travelogue about Jewish life in Argentina, his most significant later literary output became travelogues about locales both exotic and mundane.