Avraham S. Friedberg

Avraham S. Friedberg was born in Grodno, Russian Empire (today in Belarus), and raised in a traditional community. Having been apprenticed to a watchmaker, Friedberg left Grodno in 1854, eventually settling in Kishinev, where he was introduced to Haskalah literature. In 1858, he returned to Grodno as a teacher of Hebrew, Russian, and German, developed a friendship with Hebrew-language writer Avraham Mapu in Kovno, and began writing in Hebrew. Friedberg moved to St. Petersburg in 1883 as the editor of Ha-Melits, and in 1886, he moved to Warsaw, where he served as an assistant editor of the daily Ha-Tsefirah. His writings included feuilletons, essays, translations and adaptations of novels, and a collection of historical tales of the Jewish people, Zikhronot le-bet David (History of the House of David, 4 vols., 1893–1897), half of which are adaptations, in a Zionist vein, from Hermann Reckendorf’s Die Geheimnisse der Juden (5 vols., 1856–1857), a collection of fictional sketches from Jewish history.