Background
Shneur was born in Shklov (Škłoŭ) in Belarus (then part of the Russian Empire) in 1887. His parents were Isaac Zalkind and Feiga Sussman. At age 13, he left for Odessa, the center of literature and Zionism during this time.
Shneur was born in Shklov (Škłoŭ) in Belarus (then part of the Russian Empire) in 1887. His parents were Isaac Zalkind and Feiga Sussman. At age 13, he left for Odessa, the center of literature and Zionism during this time.
Shneur moved to Warsaw in 1902, and was hired by a successful publishing house. He then moved to Vilnius in 1904, where he began to publish his first book and a collection of stories. These poems were extremely successful, and many editions were published. In 1907, Shneur moved to Paris to study Natural Sciences, Philosophy, and Literature, at the Sorbonne.
From 1904 he was in Vilna where he worked on a Hebrew journal in the pages of which he published many ol his works, including his first novel. With his first volume of poetry in 1907, he had achieved a secure reputation in Hebrew letters.
After two years in Switzerland, he moved in 1907 to Paris where he studied and continued to write. He worked in a Yiddish newspaper to earn a living but World War I found him in Berlin studying medicine but he never graduated. From 1924 to 1941 he lived in Paris — with a brief interval in 1925 when he made an unsuccessful attempt to settle in Palestine. He escaped from France to New York in 1941 remaining there until he settled in Israel in 1951.
Frequently classed with Bialik and Saul Tschernichowsky as the “big three of modern Hebrew Poetry, Shneour differed in many ways from the other two. He excels in his colorful sensuality and his powerful masculinity. His secularism and humanism tend to overshadow his Jewishness and there is very little of the Zionism that motivated the other two poets. Nor does he take much interest in Jewish history concentrating very much on the present. He is full of contradictions — his Jewishness and his admiration for ancient Rome, pessimism and hedonism, are expressions of his pronounced individualism. Much of his poetry is lyrical, voicing protest, restlessness and revolution. The poet’s attitude to the world and to society, he felt, should be one of struggle. His poem “Spartacus” praises the famous leader of the slave revolt and shows his inspiration in non-Jewish culture.
His writings were bilingual. Although in his youth, he swore never to write in Yiddish, he continued to produce Yiddish classics — both because of his love for the language and in order to reach a much wider audience than could be provided by Hebrew in the first decades of the century. Shneour wrote in a great variety of genres lyric poetry, dramatic epics, plays, stories, novels and memoirs. Many of his tales center on Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement. In his latter years in Israel, he adapted for the stage one of his bestl-known stories “Noah Pandre”. He died while on a visit to New York but his body was brought back to Tel Aviv to be buried alongside Bialik and Tschcrnichowsky.
Shneur had two children: Elie Alexis, who became American Neurochemist and Biophysicist, and Renée Rebecca, who became Spanish dancer Laura Toledo.