Asch, Sholem, 1880-1957

Sholem Asch; Yiddish: שלום אַש, Polish: Szalom Asz; Born Szalom Asz, 1 November 1880, Kutno, Congress Poland, Russian Empire; Died 10 July 1957 (aged 76), London, England; Born into a Hasidic family, Sholem Asch received a traditional Jewish education. Considered the designated scholar of his siblings, his parents dreamed of him becoming a rabbi and sent him to the town's best religious school (or cheder), where the wealthy families sent their children. There, he spent most of his childhood studying the Talmud, and would later study the Bible and the Haggadah on his own time. Asch grew up in a majority Jewish town, so he grew up believing Jews were the majority in the rest of the world as well. In Kutno, Jews and gentiles mostly got along, barring some tension around religious holidays. He had to sneak through a majority gentile area to get to a lake where he loved to swim, where he was once cornered by boys wielding sticks and dogs, who demanded he admit to killing "Christ"–which Asch did not, at the time, know to be a name for Jesus–or they would rip his coat. He admitted to killing Christ out of fear, but they beat him and tore his coat anyway. Asch never lost his fear of dogs from that incident; In his adolescence, after moving from the cheder to the House of Study, Sholem became aware of major social changes in popular Jewish thinking; In 1899, he moved to Warsaw where he met I.L. Peretz and other young writers under Peretz's mentorship such as David Pinski, Abraham Reisen, and Hersh David Nomberg. Influenced by the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), Asch initially wrote in Hebrew, but Peretz convinced him to switch to Yiddish. Asch's reputation was established in 1902 with his first book of stories, In a shlekhter tsayt (In a Bad Time). In 1903, he married Mathilde Shapiro, the daughter of the Polish-Jewish teacher and poet Menahem Mendel Shapiro; In 1904, Asch released one of his most well-known works, A shtetl, an idyllic portrait of traditional Polish-Jewish life. In January 1905, he released the first play of his incredibly successful play-writing career, Tsurikgekumen (Coming Back); In 1923, God of Vengeance was translated into English, and staged on Broadway at the Apollo Theatre on West 42nd Street with a cast that included the acclaimed Jewish immigrant actor Rudolph Schildkraut. Its run was cut short after six weeks when the entire cast, producer Harry Weinberger, and one of the owners of the theater were indicted – and later convicted – on charges of obscenity; In Europe, the play was popular enough to be translated into German, Russian, Polish, Hebrew, Italian, Czech, Romanian and Norwegian. Indecent, a play written by Paula Vogel tells of those events and the impact of God of Vengeance. It opened at the Cort Theater on Broadway in April 2017, directed by Rebecca Taichman; 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, a place about which he felt deeply ambivalent. In the pursuit of a safe haven from the violence in Europe, he and his family moved to the United States in 1914, moving around New York City for a while before settling in Staten Island. In New York, he began to write for Forverts, the mass-circulation Yiddish daily that had also covered his plays, a job provided both income and an intellectual circle; In Bellevue, he wrote his 1929–31 trilogy Farn Mabul. (Before the Flood, translated as Three Cities) describes early 20th century Jewish life in Saint Petersburg, Warsaw, and Moscow. Ever the traveller, Asch took many trips to the Soviet Union, Palestine and the United States. He always held painters in high regard and formed close friendships with the like of Isaac Lichtenstein, Marc Chagall, Emil Orlik, and Jules Pascin; Asch was a celebrated writer in his own lifetime. In 1920, in honor of his 40th birthday, a committee headed by Judah L. Magnes published a 12-volume set of his collected works. In 1932 he was awarded the Polish Republic's Polonia Restituta decoration and was elected honorary president of the Yiddish PEN Club; Asch spent most of his last two years in Bat Yam near Tel Aviv, Israel, in a house that the mayor had invited him to build, but died in London at his desk writing. Had he died two or three decades earlier, his funeral would have drawn massive crowds, but, due to his controversies, it was instead a small funeral in London. His house in Bat Yam is now the Sholem Asch Museum and part of the MoBY-Museums of Bat Yam complex of three museums; The bulk of his library, containing rare Yiddish books and manuscripts, as well as the manuscripts of some of his own works, is held at Yale University. Although many of his works are no longer read today, his best works have proven to be standards of Jewish and Yiddish literature. His sons were Moszek Asz Moses "Moe" Asch (2 December 1905, Warsaw – 19 October 1986, United States), the founder and head of Folkways Records, and Natan Asz/Nathan Asch (1902, Warsaw – 1964, United States), also a writer. His great-grandson, David Mazower, is a writer and a BBC Journalist