Peretz Hirshbein

At the end of the nineteenth century, in an unspoiled rural corner of Eastern Europe, the sensitive youngest son of a miller lives in affinity with nature, keeping kinship with the river and trees, the animals and birds alike. While little Peretz admires the physical labor of his father and brothers, who tirelessly grind flour at the mill, he emerges as a star pupil at the local heder. He might amount to something, his proud parents are told—in other words, become a rabbi. But to pursue his Torah studies, the shy yeshiva boy must live among strangers in a succession of unfamiliar towns. As his horizons expand, so does his hunger to experience the world in all its complexity, and his exclusive commitment to the holy texts starts to waver. Finally, working in Vilna as a Hebrew teacher, mixing with poets and university students and reading Tolstoy and Turgenev, Shakespeare and Goethe, his destiny as a writer is made manifest. 

In graceful, lucid prose, given eloquent form by Leonard Wolf’s note-perfect translation from the Yiddish, Peretz Hirshbein chronicles with charming intimacy the first two decades of his life during a pivotal era in the history of European Jewry. A richly captivating coming-of-age memoir, My Childhood Years is also a timeless meditation on the conflict between religion and art—and a celebration of their wondrous interplay. 

About the Author

Peretz Hirshbein (1880–1948) was a Yiddish playwright, novelist, journalist, travel writer, and theater director whose work was pivotal to the development of Yiddish theater in the early twentieth century. Born in 1880 to a family of flour millers outside of Kleshtshel (Kleszczele), a town then part of the Russian Empire and now in northeast Poland, Hirshbein was a rabbinic prodigy, and it was thought he would enter the rabbinate; instead he discovered secular literature and became a writer, first in Hebrew and later in Yiddish. The rustic setting of his youth provided the backdrop for much of his writing, including his two-part memoir and a series of naturalistic plays he wrote in the 1910s that are considered masterpieces of the genre. One of them—Grine felder (Green Fields, 1918) was turned into a movie in 1937, becoming one of the best-loved Yiddish films. After visiting New York around 1912, Hirshbein spent much of the next twenty years traveling the world together with his wife, Esther Shumiatcher-Hirshbein, whom he married in 1918. In the mid-1930s, the couple settled in Los Angeles, where Hirshbein died of Lou Gehrig’s disease in 1948.

About the Translator

Leonard Wolf (1923–2019) was a poet, author, teacher, and translator. Born in Vulcan, Romania, Wolf immigrated to the United States in 1930 with his family. He began writing poetry in his teens while attending public school in Cleveland, Ohio, and served in the U.S. Army during World War II. After the war he moved to Carmel, California, where he became part of the “Berkeley Renaissance” along with poets like Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsburg, and later earned his PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Iowa. Wolf taught English literature at several colleges and universities and authored twenty-seven books, including his own novels and poetry collections. He became particularly renowned as a translator of Yiddish literature and published a Yiddish version of Winnie the Pooh.