Leizer Wolf

Leyzer Volf (; ; born Eliezer Mekler; 1910, in Šnipiškės, Vilnius – April 1943, in Shakhrisabz) was a Yiddish poet and writer of the Yung-Vilne movement, best remembered for his poems Black Pearls, Lyric and satire (1940), and Brown Beast (1943).

Biography Volf's father was a house painter and his mother was a housewife. He was the fourth child in his family.

Volf's work often appropriated European literary forms while addressing local concerns. His poem "Di veber" (The Weavers, 1935) adapted Heinrich Heine's protest poem from the previous century to rally readers against the German threat. His epic "Evigingo" (1936) was modeled on Longfellow's Hiawatha and published in Latin alphabet. Volf also reworked classic Yiddish literary characters like Sholem Aleichem's Tevye and Menachem Mendl to address contemporary political conflicts.

First lines of the "Evegingo":

The third issue of the Yung-Vilne journal contained several poems by Volf that were "more propaganda than poetry". Because of this, Shmerke Kaczerginski, as a de facto group leader, was arrested, but the judge decided that the journal had no criminal intent in it.