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Jacob Glatstein was a Polish-born American poet and literary critic who wrote in the Yiddish language. He was born 1896 August 20 in Lublin, Poland and died 1971 November 19 in New York City, New York, U.S.A. He is also known as Yankev Glatshteyn and as Jacob Glatshteyn. Although his family was an Enlightened religious family, he received a traditional education until the age of 16 and an introduction of modern Yiddish literature. He immigrated to New York City in 1914 where his uncle lived due to the increasing anti-semitism in Lublin. He worked in sweatshops while studying English. He started to study law at New York University in 1918. He married in 1919. He worked briefly at teaching before switching to journalism. Along with Aaron Glanz-Leyles (1889-1966) and N. B. Minkoff (1898-1958), in 1920 he established the Inzikhist (Introspectivist) literary movement and founded the literary organ In Sich. The Inzikhist credo rejected metered verse and declared that non-Jewish themes were a valid topic for Yiddish poetry. His books of poetry include Jacob Glatshteyn (1921) and A Jew from Lublin (1966). He was also a regular contributor to the New York Yiddish daily Morgen-Zhurnal and the Yiddisher Kemfer in which he published a weekly column entitled "In Tokh Genumen" (The Heart of the Matter). He was interested in exotic themes, in poems that emphasized the sound of words. His trip to Lublin in 1934 gave him insight into the growing storm in Europe. After this trip, his writings returned to Jewish themes and he wrote pre Holocaust works that eerily forshaddowed coming events. In 1938, he wrote the haunting poem Goodnight, World that begins: "Good night, wide world,/ big stinking world./ Not you but I slam shut the gate./ With a long gabardine,/ with a fiery yellow patch,/ with a proud stride,/ because I want to,/ I am going back to the ghetto." He became known for passionate poems written in response to the Holocaust, but many of his poems also evoke golden memories and thoughts about eternity. He won acclaim only later in life, winning the Louis Lamed Prize in 1940 for his works of prose and again in 1956 for a volume of collected poems titled "From All My Toil". He was an outstanding figure of mid-20th-century American Yiddish literature.

Selected Works

Untitled book of poems in Yiddish, 1921;Free Verse (Freie Fersen, 1926);When Yash Set Out (Venn Yash Is Gefuhrn, 1938) resulted from his 1934 trip to Lublin;Homecoming at Twilight (Venn Yash Is Gekumen, 1940), another work reflecting his 1934 trip to Lublin;Emil un Karl, a book published in 1940 and written for children. The book is about two boys in pre-WWII Vienna: Karl, a Christian from a Socialist family, and his friend Emil, a Jew. Glatstein wanted children to understand the changes taking place in Europe, where Vienna was no longer the same Vienna ("vienn is shoyn nisht di aygene vienn fun amol").;The Joy of the Yiddish Word (Die Freid fun Yiddishen Vort, 1961); andA Jew of Lublin (A Yid fun Lublin, 1966)

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