Abraham Nahum Stencl

Abraham Nahum Stencl (; ; 1897–1983) was a Polish-born Yiddish poet.

Life Stencl was born in Czeladź in south-western Poland, and studied at the yeshiva in Sosnowiec, where his brother, Shlomo Sztencl, was rabbi.

He left home in 1917; he joined a Zionist community, the HeHalutz Group. His views were not in fact Zionist, but the agricultural work appealed. In 1919 he travelled to the Netherlands and worked in the steel industry.

Stencl began to write Yiddish poetry in a pioneering modernist and expressionist style, publishing poems from 1925 and several books into the 1930s. His poems were translated into German, and were well reviewed by Thomas Mann and Arnold Zweig.

Stencl was arrested in 1936 and tortured by the Gestapo. However, he was released and made his escape to the United Kingdom, settling in London (from 1944), He found an English translator in Joseph Leftwich. He also edited the Yiddish literary journal , from 1946 to 1981. Diamant in 1951 defined Stencl's work as a mitzvah, to keep Yiddish alive.

When Stencl died in 1983, his great-niece donated his papers to the School of Oriental and African Studies.

Works Un du bist Got (, Leipzig) as A. N. Sztencl Stencl, A. N., Fischerdorf (Fishing Village), German tr. Etta Federn, Berlin-Wilmersdorf: Kartell Lyrische Autoren, 1931. Stencl, Abraham Nahum, Londoner soneṭn, Y. Naroditsḳi, 1937. Stencl, Abraham Nahum, Englishe maysṭer in der moleray : tsu der oysshṭelung itsṭ fun zeyere bilder in der arṭ-galerye in Ṿayṭshepl, Y. Naroditsḳi, 1942. Stencl, Abraham Nahum, All My Young Years : Yiddish Poetry from Weimar Germany, bilingual edition (Yiddish - English), tr. Haike Beruriah Wiegand & Stephen Watts, intro. Heather Valencia, Nottingham : Five Leaves, 2007. An English translation of one of Stencl's poems, Where Whitechapel Stood is published in Sinclair's London: City of Disappearances, referenced below.