Szalom Asz
| Sholem Asch | |
|---|---|
 Sholem Asch, 1940
| |
| Born |
Szalom Asz 1 November 1880 Kutno, Congress Poland, Russian Empire |
| Died |
10 July 1957 (aged 76) London, England |
| Nationality | Polish-Jewish |
| Other names | Szalom Asz, Shalom Asch, Shalom Ash |
| Occupation | Novelist, dramatist, and essayist |
Sholem Asch (Yiddish: שלום אַש, Polish: Szalom Asz; 1 November 1880 – 10 July 1957), also written Shalom Ash, was a Polish-Jewish novelist, dramatist, and essayist in the Yiddish language who settled in the United States.
Asch was born Szalom Asz in Kutno, Congress Poland, one of ten children of Moszek Asz (1825, Gąbin – 1905, Kutno), a cattle-dealer and innkeeper, and Frajda Malka, née Widawska (born 1850, Łęczyca), and received a traditional Jewish education until, as a young man, he followed that with a more liberal education obtained at Włocławek, where he supported himself as a letter writer for the illiterate townspeople.
From there he moved to Warsaw, where, in 1903, he married Mathilde Shapiro, the daughter of the Polish-Jewish teacher and poet Menahem Mendel Shapiro. Influenced by the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), initially Asch wrote in Hebrew, but I. L. Peretz convinced him to switch to Yiddish.
He attended the Czernowitz Yiddish Language Conference of 1908, which declared Yiddish to be "a national language of the Jewish people". He traveled to Palestine in 1908 and the United States in 1910. He sat out World War I in the United States and became a naturalized citizen in 1920. He returned to Poland and later moved to France.
His Kiddush ha-Shem (1919) is one of the earliest historical novels in modern Yiddish literature, about the anti-Jewish and anti-Polish Chmielnicki Uprising in mid-17th century Ukraine and Poland.
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