Avraham Stybel

Born in Żarki, Russian Empire (today in Poland), Avraham Stybel (Shtibl) was brought up in a Hasidic environment but was drawn to maskilic Hebrew literature from an early age. Entering business, Stybel moved to Warsaw in 1904 and established himself as a successful trader of leather goods. An enthusiastic Hebraist, he made the acquaintance of several writers involved with the development of modern Hebrew literature, and became a primary benefactor of Warsaw’s Hebrew press, providing the seed funding for a number of literary periodicals. During World War I, Stybel moved to Moscow, where he made a fortune by supplying the Russian military with leather goods imported from the United States across the Pacific. In 1917, under the impress of the ideas of the Hebrew literary critic David Frishman, Stybel founded his own publishing house dedicated particularly to translating world literature into Hebrew so as to bring belated aesthetic maturity to Hebrew literature and render it intellectually capacious enough to retain ever more cosmopolitan readers who would otherwise be drawn to richer foreign cultures. Stybel appointed Frishman himself to lead the massive translation effort, which drew in (and provided support to) dozens of Hebrew writers, and to edit the publishing house’s new deluxe flagship journal Ha-Tekufah. Following the Bolshevik Revolution and Jewish Communist destruction of his publishing house and seizure of his printing facilities, Stybel moved his press headquarters to Warsaw and opened offices in New York City, Berlin, and Tel Aviv. In 1929, the Stybel publishing house moved headquarters to Tel Aviv, where it continued to operate for more than two decades. Over the course of his career, Stybel underwrote the publication of more than one thousand Hebrew books. He died in New York.