Avraham Reisen
1876–1953
Yiddish poet and story writer. His 1902 Sukkot poem “In suke,” signed Alexander Solomon, is the song later sung as “A sukkele a kleyne.”
— Avrom Reyzen in Yiddish, אַבֿרהם רייזען — was born on 8 April 1876 in Koidanov, in the Minsk Governorate (now Dzyarzhynsk, Belarus). The house already wrote. His father, Kalman, was a Hebrew and Yiddish poet; his sister Sarah wrote poems and translations; his younger brother Zalman became the philologist of the Yiddish language.
He was fifteen when I. L. Peretz and Jacob Dinezon printed his poem “Ven dos lebn is farbitert” (“When life is embittered”). The next year, in Vilna, came his first story, titled “Damn the nose, so long as there is a dowry of a gold watch and 300 rubles.” Sholem Aleichem recommended the poetry booklet Troyerike motivn (Sad Motifs Dedicated to the Poor). The poems stay short and plain, about people with little, closer to a folksong than to a speech. He translated Heinrich Heine into Yiddish. Some of the sharper poems were sung at secret workers’ meetings in the woods.
From 1895 to 1899 he served in a musicians’ unit of the Russian army. After that, a short stay in Minsk, then Warsaw. He wrote for the Zionist paper Der yud and did not share its politics, so in 1900 he started his own anthology, Dos tsvantsikste yorhundert (The Twentieth Century), with Peretz and others in it. For the Bund he sometimes signed M. Vilner. On 15 October 1902, twenty-six and living in Warsaw, he published the Sukkot poem “In suke” on the cover of the Kraków weekly Yudishe froyen-velt under the pen name Alexander Solomon. Singers soon treated it as a folk song, “A sukkele a kleyne.” He was not a (חסידיש) (חסידי). (חסידיש) (חסידי) communities later reworded the poem and kept singing it.
In 1908 he stood for Yiddish at the Czernowitz conference, which called Yiddish a national language of the Jews. He settled in New York in early 1911 and wrote for the Forverts. From 1929 a story there every week, without a break. His three-volume autobiography Epizodn fun mayn lebn appeared in 1935. He died in New York on 2 April 1953.