Table Of ContentVerso Running Head i
POYLN
My Life within Jewish Life in Poland,
Sketches and Images
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Verso Running Head iii
Poyln
My Life within Jewish Life
in Poland,
Sketches and Images
YEHIEL YESHAIA TRUNK
Translated from the Yiddish by Anna Clarke
Edited by Piotr Wróbel and Robert M. Shapiro
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2007
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
ISBN 978-08020-9330-1
Printed on acid-free paper
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Trunk, Yehiel Yeshaia, 1887–1961
Poyln : my life within Jewish life in Poland : sketches and images / Yehiel
Yeshaia Trunk ; translated from the Yiddish by Anna Clarke ; edited by Piotr
Wróbel and Robert M. Shapiro.
ISBN 978-0-8020-9330-1
1. Jews – Poland – History. 2. Jews – Poland – Social life and customs.
3. Trunk, Yehiel Yeshaia, 1887–1961. 4. Trunk family. 5. Hasidism – Poland.
6. Jews, Polish – Biography. 7. Authors, Yiddish – Biography. I. Clarke,
Anna II. Wróbel, Piotr III. Shapiro, Robert Moses IV. Title.
PJ5129.T77P6513 2007 839′.18309 C2007-902126-3
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its
publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts
Council.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its
publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book
Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
Verso Running Head v
Contents
Editor’s Preface vii
Introduction ix
Map of Poland xiii
Family Tree xiv
Prologue 3
Chapter One 5
Chapter Two 10
Chapter Three 20
Chapter Four 27
Chapter Five 30
Chapter Six 40
Chapter Seven 44
Chapter Eight 63
vi Contents
Chapter Nine 68
Chapter Ten 72
Chapter Eleven 77
Chapter Twelve 92
Chapter Thirteen 97
Chapter Fourteen 100
Chapter Fifteen 103
Chapter Sixteen 109
Chapter Seventeen 114
Chapter Eighteen 117
Chapter Nineteen 127
Chapter Twenty 136
Chapter Twenty-one 146
Chapter Twenty-two 153
Chapter Twenty-three 162
Verso Running Head vii
Editor’s Preface
Poyln, by Yehiel Yeshaia Trunk, initiates a new editorial series
devoted to the history of Polish Jews. Published under the aus-
pices of the Polish-Jewish Heritage Foundation of Canada,
Toronto Chapter, and the Konstanty Reynert Chair of Polish
History at the University of Toronto, the series aims at presenting
all aspects of the rich history of Polish Jews and to reclaim their
legacy, almost destroyed during the Holocaust and in danger of
being forgotten in North America. The aim of the series can best
be summarized in the words of Rabbi Byron L. Sherwin: ‘Only
when what existed in Poland before the Holocaust is understood
can one truly discern the dimensions of the loss. From this per-
spective, it is important for Jews today to see Poland not only as a
huge Jewish cemetery, but also as a country where Jews created
unprecedented works of the spirit, as a land where Judaism flour-
ished freely and developed beyond what previously had been, as
a landscape dotted with Jewish spiritual monuments.’1
The present book is the first volume of Poyln. The main body
of the text has been translated by Anna Clarke, who had previ-
ously translated excerpts from Poylninto both Polish and English.
Piotr Wróbel wrote an introduction and prepared the footnotes,
a family tree for Trunk, and a map of Trunk’s Poland. Robert M.
Shapiro, Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at Brooklyn College
1 Byron L. Sherwin, Sparks amidst the Ashes: The Spiritual Legacy of Polish Jewry (New York
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 7.
viii Editor’s Preface
of the City University of New York, translated Trunk’s Prologue
and reviewed the translation and the footnotes. Poylnis a moving
testimony, a colourful epic, and an extremely interesting book.
Until now, only small fragments of it have been translated into
English. We are proud to present for the first time in English the
entire first volume of Poyln.
Piotr Wróbel
Konstanty Reynert Chair of Polish History
University of Toronto
Verso Running Head ix
Introduction
Poyln(Poland) is one of the treasures of world literature. Written
in early-twentieth-century Polish Yiddish, it has so far been
unavailable in English. Its author, Yehiel Yeshaia Trunk, was an
outstanding Polish Jewish writer, and Poyln is an important his-
torical primary source.
Trunk was born in 1887 in the village of Osmólsk, not far from
Warsaw, into a rich family of Jewish landowners on his mother’s
side and of scholars and rabbis on his father’s side. After several
years of carefree childhood in the village of D/lutów, he and his
family moved to L/ ódz´, a big industrial city in the centre of
Russian-occupied Poland. There, Trunk received a traditional
religious education, but at the same time he was taught secular
subjects by private tutors who, among other things, gave their
pupil a good knowledge of several languages.
Trunk started writing in Hebrew. His first texts were written in
1905, when, in a personal diary, he described revolutionary
events in /Lódz´. Soon, however, he was to change his literary voice
from Hebrew to Yiddish. Trunk’s father, a successful entrepre-
neur, was an avid reader. He studied international literature and
knew personally the great Jewish writer Isaac Leib Peretz
(1852–1915). Under the influence of Peretz, Trunk switched to
Yiddish and sought to achieve a synthesis of modern European
and traditional Jewish literary and intellectual trends. Like Oyzer
Warszawski (1898–1944), Alter Kacyzne (1885–1941), Moshe Just-
man (1889–1942), Israel Joshua Singer (1893–1944), and Isaac
