Poyln: Land of Sages and Tsadikim

Summary

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

YEHIEL YESHAIA TRUNK, author of Poyln: Zikhroynes un bilder (7 vols.; New York, 1946-53), from which these sketches are taken, was born in 1887 in Osmolin, near Łowicz in central Poland. On his mother's side, he came from a family of village Jews. His maternal grandfather had become the administrator of one of the Sapieha estates, and ultimately succeeded in purchasing an estate of his own, Osmolin, where Trunk spent much of his childhood. On his father's side, he was the descendant of a long line of rabbis. As he relates in the first of the sketches below, his paternal grandfather was the Gaon Reb Yehiel Kutner, and he was also linked, as he describes, with the Vorker Hasidim. This part of his family was connected to the prominent Warsaw family of ironmongers, the Pryweses, who appear in two of the sketches and who, thinly disguised, are the central figures in Isaac Bashevis Singer's The Family Moskat. Trunk began his writing career in 1908, strongly influenced by Yitshak Leibush Peretz. He described his first encounter with Peretz in Poyln, in a section which has been translated into English by the late Lucy Dawidowicz and printed in her anthology The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe (New York, 1967), 297-304. He was introduced to Peretz by his uncle, who had become a follower of the Haskalah, and he describes his approach to the great writer's apartment on 1 Ceglana as ‘the most decisive walk in my life. Thirty-odd years later when I passed these streets, my heart still beat excitedly in remembrance of that earlier walk. I have never forgotten the cobblestones, a certain street lamp, a newspaper kiosk, and a dozen other details that caught my eye.'

Trunk had brought with him some of his writings in Hebrew, although he was already beginning to write in Yiddish:

I did not consider my Yiddish writings as containing the essence of my spirituality. In Hebrew I hoped to express my intellectual moods, my introspections, the subtlety of my observations. In Yiddish I wrote about my milieu and especially my feeling for nature, which was always strong-I had spent my childhood and many months of my later life in the country.