Gershon Shofman

Gershon Shofman was born in 1880 in Vorsha

Gershon Shofman was born in 1880 in Orsha, in the Mogilev Governorate of the Russian Empire, today in Belarus. His parents were Zalman and Feiga Haya Levin, and the family was Hasidic. He received a traditional Jewish education in a heder and a yeshiva.

He moved to Warsaw, a center of Hebrew literature, and in 1902 published his first collection of stories. He then served in the Russian army in Gomel. In 1904, at the start of the Russo-Japanese War, he deserted and fled to Lviv.

In Lviv he wrote many stories and lived for a year with Yosef Haim Brenner. In 1913 he moved to Vienna. He married Anna Plank, who converted to Judaism, and they settled in Wetzelsdorf near Graz.

In 1938, after the Nazi annexation of Austria, he immigrated with his family to the Land of Israel and settled in Tel Aviv. He published in the newspaper Davar and with the Am Oved press. In 1954 he moved to Haifa, where he was an honorary citizen.

His collected works appeared in 5 volumes in 1960. He died in 1972 and was buried in the Hof HaCarmel cemetery. Streets in Beersheba and Haifa bear his name.