WEINSTEIN, BERISH

WEINSTEIN, BERISH (1905–1967), Yiddish poet. Born to a ḥasidic family in Rzeszow (western Galicia), he moved to Vienna in 1923 and to New York two years later. His first book, Brukhvarg ("Fragments," 1936), is a masterpiece of rough expressionism. In long, Whitmanesque lines, elliptical syntax, and Galician dialect, Weinstein describes the depths of eastern Europe and New York, a world of sailors, thieves, and blood-thirsty gentiles. In his second book, Reyshe ("Rzeszow," 1947), in which he recreates his vanished birthplace, a noted center of religious learning, Weinstein began an autobiographical trilogy, continuing with Amerike (1955) and Dovid Hameylekhs Giter ("King David's Estates," 1960), where he glorifies the formation of the State of Israel. In 1949 Weinstein collected his early poems into Lider un Poemes ("Poems and Long Poems"), where few pieces from Brukhvarg reappear, and even they are severely shorn of their roughness and descriptive detail: Weinstein had elided his original and daring modernism in order to write in the vein of nostalgia and nationalist Jewish unity demanded by conservative critical taste after the Holocaust. His last book of verse, Basherte Lider ("Destined Poems"), appeared in 1965.

bibliography:

B. Weinstein, Reisha (Heb. 1951), 5–29 (introd. by D. Sadan); I. Howe and E. Greenberg (eds.), A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry (1969), 291–3. add. bibliography. J. Glatstein, in: Oyf Greyte Temes (1967) 123–7; B. and B. Harshav (eds.), American Yiddish Poetry (1986), 628–73; B. Kagan, Leksikon fun Yidish-Shraybers (1986), 239–41.

[Leonard Prager /

Itay Zutra (2^nd ed.)]