Itzhak Peretz

Isaac Leib Peretz (May 18, 1852 – April 3, 1915), also sometimes written Yitskhok Leybush Peretz (; ), was a Polish Jewish writer and playwright writing in Yiddish. Payson R. Stevens, Charles M. Levine, and Sol Steinmetz count him with Mendele Mokher Seforim and Sholem Aleichem as one of the three great classical Yiddish writers. Sol Liptzin wrote: "Yitzkhok Leibush Peretz was the great awakener of Yiddish-speaking Jewry and Sholom Aleichem its comforter... Peretz aroused in his readers the will for self-emancipation, the will for resistance against the many humiliations to which they were being subjected."

Peretz rejected cultural universalism, seeing the world as composed of different nations, each with its own character. In Liptzin's account, "very people is seen by him to be a chosen people, chosen by its peculiar history, geography and ethnic composition"; he conceived of Jewish literature as "grounded in Jewish traditions and Jewish history", and as "the expression of Jewish ideals".

Peretz was part of the Haskalah movement. In the 1870s, as a young maskil, Peretz looked down upon Yiddish as “jargon,” a term of contempt employed by many Jewish intellectuals. After the pogroms of 1881, which set off the first great wave of migration to America, Peretz's feeling for Yiddish grew warmer and he began to connect to the East European Jewish intelligentsia's movement towards Yiddish, yet intent upon a rationalist modernizing of Jewish thought.

However, while many other Maskilim mocked or derided Hasidic Judaism, Peretz greatly respected the Hasidic Jews for their mode of being in the world; at the same time, his narratives made allowances for human frailty.

His short stories such as "If Not Higher", "The Treasure", and "Beside the Dying" emphasize "unsensational deeds of piety" over empty religiosity.

Peretz eventually became a leading founder in the Yiddishist movement. He is regarded as foundational to modern Yiddish fiction and one of the highly influential, central figures in the Yiddishist movement.

Biography

Born in Zamość, in Lublin Governorate, Congress Poland, a city known as an important center of the Haskalah, or Jewish enlightenment, Peretz was raised there in an Orthodox Jewish home. His father, Yude, was a merchant, and his mother, Rivke, also helped to run the family's shop; Peretz was the oldest of three siblings who survived to adulthood. Mostly taught by private tutors, he received a traditional Jewish education in Hebrew and rabbinic texts, and for a short time, at around the age of 13, studied at yeshivot in Zamość and the nearby town of Szczebrzeszyn. He also had tutors for Russian, Polish, and German.

For the next several years Peretz embarked upon various business ventures in the region, He found temporary work in 1890 as a member of an expedition, sponsored by philanthropist Jan Bloch, to conduct a statistical survey of Polish Jews; his experiences visiting small towns and villages of the Tomaszów province in southeastern Poland became the basis of his fictional sketches Bilder fun a Provints-Rayze (Pictures from a Provincial Journey). and Lamed Shapiro. He also collaborated with them on multiple anthologies and publications, such as Di yontef bletlekh (Holiday Pages), another landmark Yiddish literary anthology in which he participated together with fellow authors Jacob Dinezon, Mordecai Spector, and David Pinski.

Around 1907, Peretz initiated a Yiddish dramatic group within the recently founded Hazomir (The Nightingale), an association for Jewish music and literature, which became a lively cultural center of pre-World War I Yiddish Warsaw.

Towards the end of his life, as refugees poured into Warsaw from the war zone between Russia and Germany, Peretz and fellow author Jacob Dinezon helped found an orphanage and establish schools for displaced Jewish children.

Peretz died in the city of Warsaw, Congress Poland, in 1915. He was buried at the Okopowa Street Jewish Cemetery with a huge crowd, about 100,000 strong, attending the burial ceremony.

Works

Peretz wrote in both Hebrew and Yiddish. A writer of social criticism, sympathetic to the labor movement, Peretz wrote stories, folk tales and plays. Liptzin characterizes him as both a realist – "an optimist who believed in the inevitability of progress through enlightenment" – and a romanticist, who "delved into irrational layers of the soul and sought to set imaginations astir with visions of Messianic possibilities."

Much as Jacob Gordin influenced Yiddish theater in New York City in a more serious direction, so did Peretz in Eastern Europe. Israil Bercovici sees Peretz's works for the stage as a synthesis of Gordin and of the more traditional and melodramatic Abraham Goldfaden, an opinion which Peretz himself apparently would not have rejected: "The critics", he wrote, "the worst of them thought that M.M. Seforim was my model. This is not true. My teacher was Abraham Goldfaden."

Peretz's 1907 play Bay nakht afn altn mark ("At Night in the Old Marketplace"), set in a Jewish shtetl over the course of a single night, presents a panoramic review of Jewish life in Poland. The play was adapted into a multimedia theatrical presentation, with music by Frank London and book and lyrics by Glen Berger, in 2007.

Family and descendants The American journalist Martin Peretz is one of his descendants. The French author Georges Perec was a distant relative. Descendants of Peretz's brother – including physicians, teachers, attorneys, and performers – reside in the Tri-state area of New York City.

Commemoration

Peretz Square in Lower Manhattan, which marks the spot where Houston Street, First Avenue, and First Street meet, is named after him. It was dedicated on November 23, 1952.

There are streets in Warsaw, in Zamość, in Kutno and in Wrocław (also a square) named after him (ulica Icchaka Lejba Pereca in Polish).

There are streets named after Peretz in Israel in multiple cities: Tel Aviv, Hod Hasharon, Bat Yam, Haifa, Kiryat Yam, Holon, Givat Shmuel.