Jacob Steinberg
Jacob Steinberg was a major Ukrainian-born poet in Mandatory Palestine.
Biography
Jacob Steinberg was born in Bila Tserkva, but ran off to Odessa when he was 14, joining Bialik and other Jewish intellectuals of the Hebrew literary circle there. In 1903 Steinberg moved to Warsaw, and participated in Peretz's literary circle. In 1910 he moved to Switzerland, studying in university at Bern and Lucerne. He soon returned to Warsaw. During those years, he published works in Hebrew and Yiddish, especially in the Yiddish newspaper "Der Fraind". While still in Europe, he married and divorced a dentist with whom he had one son.In 1914, Steinberg immigrated to Palestine, and wrote exclusively in Hebrew ever since. In 1929, he married Liza Arlosoroff, a musician, and sister of Haim Arlosoroff, and later edited Haim Arlosoroff's writings.
He remained in Tel Aviv for the rest of his life, though he briefly lived in Berlin in the 1920s. He received the Bialik Prize in 1937.
Literary style
He defied trends in two significant ways: his poetry was individualistic rather than nationalistic, and he wrote in the Ashkenazic dialect rather than the Sephardic dialect, which became the accepted norm of Israeli Hebrew. His two most famous poems are "Not an enclosed Garden" and "Confession".His first publication was poems for children in the weekly Olam Katan. Since 1903, he published poems in HaShiloah and other periodicals in Hebrew. In Warsaw he published two poetry collections: "Bidut" and "Sefer ha-satirot". He also simultaneously published poems and short stories in Yiddish, which were collected in the book Gezamltte font. After moving to Israel for ideological reasons, he stopped writing in Yiddish. His only poem in Hebrew is Masa Avshalom, which was largely autobiographical.
Steinberg's early works clearly show the influence of Bialik and Russian Romanticism. In his later works, features of Russian and French symbolism can be traced. Yaakov Steinberg was originally a bilingual writer, but later abandoned Yiddish for ideological reasons and wrote only in Hebrew.
The constant motif of his stories is a tireless passion that is suppressed by strict prohibitions. The problems of marriage in traditional Jewish families are often raised, and female characters are quite significant. The most famous works of the artist's oeuvre are the stories "The Blind Woman" and "The Rabbi's Daughter".