Israel Isidor Elyashev

Israel Isidor Eljaschoff ( in other transliterations; author name Baal Makhshoves; * September 13, 1873 in Kaunas, Empire Russia, † January 13, 1924 in Kaunas, Lithuania) was a physician, writer and literary critic in the Yiddish language.

Life

Eljaschoffs parents were wealthy Jews in Kaunas. At the age of ten he attended Yeshiva in Grobiņa, Latvia, and twelve from a high school in Switzerland. Eljaschoff studied biology and medicine in Berlin and Heidelberg. As a physician, he practiced in Kaunas, Vilnius, Warsaw and St. Petersburg. In Berlin, he began his first literary attempts. He got into the circle of Theodor Herzl and took in August 1897 as a delegate from Germany at the first Zionist Congress in Basel in part. From 1899 he wrote at the request of the Warsaw publicist Joseph Lurie ( 1871-1937 ), editor of the Warsaw weekly Der yud, also in Yiddish. Theodor Herzl asked him for the translation of the novel Old-New Land (1902 ) from German into Yiddish and Eljaschoff thus became one of the most widely read Yiddish translator, he also has Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev translated.

After fifteen years' residence in the West, he went in 1901 to Warsaw, where he only cursorily worked as a doctor in order to devote himself mainly to literature. His regular literature reviews in The yud made ​​him the leading literary critic and literary theorist of Yiddish literature and provided for the further spread of classical Yiddish writers Sholem Aleichem, Mendele Mocher Sefarim, Jizchok Leib Peretz and Nachum Sokolow and modern Hebrew writers like Chaim Nachman Bialik and Sholem Asch. Given the linguistic duality emphasized Elias Hoff the unity of the Jewish literature: " Tsvey Shprakhn - Eyneyntsike literature." In 1910 he was in Riga editor of the daily The Jewish Voice and 1912, columnist in the newspaper Freind in Warsaw. Eljaschoff let his collected writings appear in Vilnius between 1910 and 1915.

During the First World War its publication activity was interrupted, since not only the Yiddish press was censored and then set tightened but he himself was drafted as an army doctor in the Imperial Russian Army. In the 1918 armistice he went to Kiev.

In September 1921 he took part in Carlsbad on the 12th Zionist Congress. After his plans were shattered, now in Kaunas, Lithuania to act within the framework of an autonomous Jewish cultural work, he took over in Berlin in 1921 the management of the Yiddish department in Klal publishing house. His literary work flourished only briefly, because he fell ill and returned in 1923 in his birthplace to Kaunas back.

His younger sister Esther Eljaschoff (1878-1941) was a university professor of philosophy at St. Petersburg and founded in 1921 the Jewish high school courses in Kaunas.

Writings (selection )

• Isidor Eljaschoff: Ch D. Nomberg, in: East and West, 11, 1903, pp. 763-768
• Dr. J. Eljaschoff, About jargon ( " Jewish " ) and slang literature, in: Berthold Feiwel & Ephraim Moses Lilien (eds.), The Jewish Almanac 5663, Berlin: Jewish Publishing, 1902, p 58