Creator Bio
Leopold Kompert
1822–1886
Leopold Kompert grew up on the “Gasse”—the one street in small Bohemian towns where Jews were allowed to live. The son of a poor wool merchant in Münchengrätz (Mnichovo Hradište), he left home at age seventeen, and supported himself as a tutor and journalist while traveling throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Kompert’s nostalgic stories of small-town Bohemian Jewish life are foundational texts of the “ghetto fiction” genre, and in his later years he was a significant figure in the Viennese Jewish community.
Entries in the Posen Library by This Creator
Primary Source
The Death of the Tavern Keeper’s Wife
With every stone that was set in the new barn, another drop of life seemed to ebb from the wife of the randar or tavern keeper. When she looked out at the building, she often said that she would not…