Craft: Berl Pomerantz

Berl Pomerantz (1901-1942) was an obscure Hebrew language poet. He was born in Odrizhin, near Pinsk (modern day Belarus) and moved to Warsaw, Poland in the early 1930s. Pomerantz is unusual in that he was a modernist, but he wrote in Hebrew before it was a modern spoken language. This distinction made his poems look back to the 10th century B.C.E. and forward into the future no one can see.

Little is known about Pomerantz’s early life. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, his family moved to Janów (also known as Ivanava in Belarussian), in southeastern Poland. Pomerantz then moved to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, where he was admitted to the Hebrew Teachers Seminary and to a conservatory. He became fluent in Polish, then taught Hebrew and the Bible at a secondary school in Janów. In 1935, after his move to Warsaw, he made a living translating Yiddish and Polish, but started struggling with work. He made multiple failed attempts to emigrate to Palestine because he could was not able to get documents.

Though there were attempts to revive Hebrew as a literary language since the 19th century, Hebrew was did not become a modern language until 1948, when Israel became a state and Hebrew was chosen to become its official language. Prior to that, at least for Eastern European Jews, Yiddish was the spoken language of the street (speakers of other languages such as Ladino, which is Judeo-Spanish, Judeo-Italian, Judeo-Tajik, and so on also existed in small numbers). Pomerantz’s Hebrew was pre-modern in the sense that the major context for the language, in his time, was religious texts.