Aaron Zeitlin
1898–1973
Yiddish and Hebrew poet and playwright who wrote the lyric of “Dona Dona” for his play Esterke — stranded in New York in 1939, he never saw his family in Warsaw again.
was born in 1898 in Uvarovichi (now Belarus), the son of the writer and thinker Hillel Zeitlin, and came of age in Gomel, Vilna, and Warsaw. He wrote in both Yiddish and Hebrew — poetry, fiction, criticism — chaired the Yiddish PEN Club in Warsaw, and edited the literary monthly Globus, where Isaac Bashevis Singer was a close collaborator. He published the play Esterke there in 1932. In 1939 invited him to New York to prepare a production; the war closed the way home, and his wife, children, father, and brother were murdered. He settled in New York, taught Hebrew literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and wrote some of the most unsparing Yiddish and Hebrew poems of the destruction. The lyric he gave for Esterke — “Dona Dona,” or “Dos kelbl (דאָס קעלבל)” — outlived the play. He died in 1973.