Lamed Shapiro
| Lamed Shapiro | |
|---|---|
| Born | Levi Yehoshua Shapiro 1878 Rzhyschiv, Ukraine |
| Died | 1948 Los Angeles, California, United States |
Levi Yehoshua Shapiro (Yiddish: ל. שאַפּיראָ, born 1878, died 1948), better known as "Lamed Shapiro", (that is, the initial for the Hebrew letter lamed), was an American Yiddish-language writer. His stories are best known for such themes as murder, rape, and cannibalism.
He was born on March 10, 1878, in Rzhyschiv, Ukraine. In 1896, he traveled to Warsaw, Poland, struggled to work for two years, then returned to Ukraine. He experienced a pogrom, fell in love and attempted suicide, and was later conscripted into the Czar's army. These experiences would influence much of his rather dark, fictional themes. Shapiro returned to Warsaw in 1903, and I.L. Peretz helped him publish his first literary works: "Di Fligl" (The Wings); and, the next year, a longer story called "Itsikl Mamzer" (Little Isaac the Bastard), published in a journal edited by Avrom Reyzen. To Peretz he would dedicate one of his works, "Smoke", a tale of the Old World (Peretz would serve as an early benefactor of another famous Yiddish writer, Der Nister).
Shapiro left for America in 1905. He stayed for a year in London, where he befriended the Hebrew writer Yosef Haim Brenner. After arriving in New York in 1906, and working for The Jewish Daily Forward, he began publishing his gruesome pogrom tales: "The Kiss" (1907); "Pour Out Thy Wrath" (1908); "The Cross" (1909); "In The Dead Town" (1910). Shapiro's work marks a break from that of the three classic Yiddish writers in its foregrounding of violence and psychological realism, rather than satirical commentary. Shapiro subsequently returned to Warsaw for a year, then returned permanently to the United States in 1911. By 1919, Shapiro had written what are considered his two greatest pogrom stories: "White Challah" and "The Jewish Government." The two stories "remain some of the most aesthetically nuanced and psychologically complex treatments of the pogrom theme in modern Jewish literature."
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