Gabriel Preil

The Hebrew–Yiddish American modernist poet Gabriel Preil was born in Tartu, Estonia; he immigrated to New York in 1922. Influenced by the avant-garde Yiddish poets of the Inzikhist (Introspectivist) movement, he began writing in Yiddish but spent the bulk of his career writing in Hebrew. He published his first book of Hebrew poetry in 1944 and, in addition to original works, translated American poets including Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, and Robinson Jeffers into what he referred to as “the language of my heart.” Although he had few American readers, Preil’s influence was felt in Israel, where he was awarded the prestigious Bialik Prize in 1991.