Yitsḥak Dov Berkowitz

Born in Slutsk (today in Belarus) into a working-class family, Yitzḥak Dov Berkowitz (Berkovitsh) received a traditional education but also immersed himself in modern Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian literature. Working as a teacher in Łódź, he published his first mature Hebrew story in 1903 in Warsaw’s Ha-Tsofeh journal and was immediately hailed in the small Hebrew literary world as a bold new voice. He consolidated this reputation over the next two years with some twenty Hebrew stories that investigated the psychological interiority and difficult emotional states of uprooted or foundationless Jewish young people while also situating those figures and their woes in a realistically represented and imagined societal reality—thus marking an important step in the creation of a mature literary realism in Hebrew. Although Berkowitz would continue to write creatively in Hebrew (and soon too in Yiddish) for the rest of his long life in Europe, the United States, and after 1928 in Palestine and Israel, his most notable achievements after this first burst of writing lay in projects deriving from a familial connection. Having married Sholem Aleichem’s daughter, Ernestina Rabinovitsh, in 1906, Berkowitz became the great writer’s literary executor and ultimately produced the first classic translation of Sholem Aleichem’s work in Hebrew. Late in life, he also wrote a particularly rich collective biography of the turn-of-the-century Hebrew and Yiddish literary spheres, in Hebrew and Yiddish versions.