Background

Peretz Hirschbein was born on November 7, 1880 in Kleszczele, Russian Empire (now Poland). The youngest of seven children, he was the son of Lippe Hirschbein and Sheine (Hollander) Hirschbein. Although the father owned a water mill, the family was poor and without formal education. From an early age, Peretz absorbed the folklore and superstitions of his rural Jewish surroundings.

Education

Hirschbein entered the village heder (religious school) when he was seven, a late age for those times, and made such rapid progress that his parents were encouraged to think he might become a rabbi. At twelve he was sent to various yeshivas (Talmudic schools) to continue his education. For five years he lived the hard life of a poor yeshiva student, eating at a different house each day of the week. In the process, he learned a great deal about the life of the Jews in the Russian Pale and came in contact with secular books in Yiddish. It was not long before he began to study Russian and German secretly, and, under the influence of Haskalah (the enlightenment movement) and Zionism, he discarded all notions of a rabbinic career.

Career

In 1898 Hirschbein went to Vilna, a center of Jewish culture, where he met other Jewish writers, to whom he showed his first efforts: verses in Hebrew and some stories in Yiddish. He supported himself by giving Hebrew lessons, and teaching history to some yeshiva students. In 1904 he moved to Warsaw, where the great Jewish writers of the day lived: the Hebrew poet H. N. Bialik, Abraham Reisen, Sholem Asch, and Jacob Dineson, who encouraged him to write drama. Miriam, written in Hebrew and published in 1905 in the periodical Ha-Zeman, is the tragic story of a poor Jewish girl who, after having been seduced by a rich man, becomes a prostitute. Several short plays in Hebrew followed, naturalistic portrayals of life, in which the themes of poverty and helplessness prevail: The Carcass (1905), Where Life Passes (1906), and Lonely People (1906).

His first drama in Yiddish, Oif Yenner Sait Taikh ("On the Other Side of the River, " 1906), marked the beginning of a new phase in another respect as well. Hirschbein discarded naturalism in favor of symbolism, and his work showed the influence of both Maurice Maeterlinck and Leonid Andreyev. The play was translated into Russian and successfully produced in Odessa. Die Erd ("Earth, " 1907), written during a brief stay in Berlin, expressed a dislike of city life--another recurrent theme. Tkias Kaf ("The Contract, " 1907), written in St. Petersburg, foreshadows S. Anski's famous play The Dybbuk. It is the tragedy of a young girl pledged by her father to a young man who dies before releasing her from the pledge, and whose spirit prevents her from marrying another man.

In 1908, Hirschbein formed a theatrical company in Odessa, the Hirschbein Troupe, which for two years toured the Ukraine and White Russia in productions of his own plays and those of Asch, Issak Peretz, Sholom Aleichem and Jacob Gordin. The Hirschbein Troupe made a significant contribution to Yiddish theater by raising its artistic level and by attracting Russian Jewish intellectual circles to its performances. Its influence made itself felt on the establishment of the famous Vilna Yiddish Troupe and, later still, on the New York Yiddish Art Theatre. Restlessness drove Hirschbein from city to city: Odessa, Vilna, St. Petersburg, Kiev, Vienna, Paris, London, and finally New York, where he arrived in November 1911. There, he completed in a few months Die Puste Kretshme ("The Haunted Inn"), the first of a series of folk dramas that evoked the rural atmosphere of his childhood. A Farvorfen Vinkel ("A Forsaken Corner, " 1912) blended realistic and mystical elements, and was followed in the same year by the symbolic drama Dos Kindt vun der Velt ("A Child of the World"). Unable to get his plays produced, Hirschbein returned to Russia in 1913.

In 1914, Hirschbein went to Argentina to visit the colonies established by Baron de Hirsch and his Jewish Colonization Association. At the outbreak of World War I, he embarked for New York, by way of Brazil, where he arrived in November 1914 after an eventful voyage (the English steamer he sailed on was sunk by a German warship). He became a contributor to the newly founded daily newspaper Der Tog, which serialized his travel experiences, later published under the title Fun Veite Lender ("From Distant Lands").

In the summer of 1915, the newspaper sent him to San Francisco to cover the Panama-Pacific-International Exposition. His impressions of places and people encountered went into his book Travels in America (1918), in which he exhibited a sensitive understanding of the problems faced by the diverse ethnic groups of the country: Indians, Negroes, European immigrants, and Jews. During the war years, Hirschbein wrote several one-act plays: The Prophet Elijah; Bebele; Raisins and Almonds (all of which were published in 1915 in the periodical Die Zukunft). The Blacksmith's Daughters, a comedy, appeared in 1915 as well, and a year later he completed Green Fields (the first of a trilogy of plays based on the character of Levi Isaak), his best and most popular work. This tender love story in a pastoral setting was preserved in a filmed version. The two plays that completed the trilogy were Two Towns (1919) and Levi Isaak (1923).

In 1916 a five-volume edition of his works was published. The income he derived from his plays, the newspaper Der Tog, and the lectures (especially in North and South America) enabled the Hirschbeins to travel extensively. During 1920-1923, they journeyed through Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, and South Africa. Descriptions of this trip were serialized in Der Tog, and later incorporated in his book Arum der Velt ("Around the World, " 1927). Spirits Know Why (1922) and The Mouse with the Bell (1924) were two symbolist dramas; the latter, written in free verse and set in an American steel foundry, showed ex-pressionist influences.

In 1924-1929, the Hirschbeins traveled through India (where they met Gandhi and Tagore, the Hindu poet, and lived for some time on the Tibetan border), Israel, and the Crimea (where they spent an entire year with Jews who had settled in the agricultural communes there). His experiences are documented in India and Eretz Israel, both published in 1929, and in the novel Roite Felder ("Red Fields, " 1935), a realistic treatment of life on the Jewish collective farms in the Crimea. The novel's value lay in its contribution to our understanding of the social and historical implications of the unusual experiment, rather than in its artistic merit. More successful from a literary point of view was the first volume of his memoirs, Years of Childhood. A moving account of the first eighteen years of his life, it was published in 1932. The trilogy Bovel ("Babylon"), a massive novel serialized in Der Tog over a number of years before its publication in 1942, traced the fortunes of a family from their arrival in the United States in 1883 to the outbreak of World War II. Hirschbein touched on nearly every aspect of the American Jewish experience as it affected the first and second generations of immigrants.

In 1940, Hirschbein moved to Los Angeles with his family. There he continued to work on his memoirs, preparing the second volume, In the Process of Life (1948). The book records the author's difficulties in establishing a literary career. He also began a novel of Jewish life in America, Oif Fremde Vegen ("Strange Roads"), which appeared in installments in Der Tog from 1947 to his death in 1948. He died in Los Angeles after three years of intense suffering from aminotropic lateral sclerosis and is buried in Beth Olam Cemetery in Hollywood.

Achievements

• Hirschbein is widely regarded as one of the most prominent and prolific Jewish novelists and playwrights. His greatest contribution lies in his portrayal of the ordinary Jew, the folksmentsh, and his innate humane qualities, his mentshlekhkait. Valuable, too, are Hirschbein's travel books and memoirs, revealing an enormous range of interests. The fiction, though competently written, is artistically less successful. Still, the sum total of Hirschbein's work, especially his contributions to the emerging Yiddish theater, have assured him an honored place in the front ranks of Yiddish writers of the first half of the twentieth century.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Haunted Inn; A Drama in Four Acts

    (Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)

  • Six Plays of the Yiddish Theatre, Second Series

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

  • Miriam (A Play)

    (Drama / Anthology ~ Annotated English Translation)

Connections

On a lecture tour through Western Canada in 1918, Hirschbein met, in Calgary, the Yiddish poet Esther Shumiatcher, whom he married on December 11, 1918, after a brief courtship. They had one son.

Father:

Lippe Hirschbein

Mother:

Sheine (Hollander) Hirschbein

Spouse:

Esther (Shumiatcher) Hirschbein

Son:

Amos Hirschbein