Literatureהירש אושרוביץ'

Hirsch Oscherowitsch

Hirsch Osherovich was a Lithuanian-born Yiddish poet and playwright who was imprisoned in a Soviet labor camp and later settled in Israel in 1971.

1908 to 1994Yiddish poetryImprisonment in a Soviet labor campThe Itzik Manger Prize

Born: 25 June 1908, Panevėžys
Died: 6 June 1994, Tel Aviv
Occupation: poet, writer
Education: Vytautas Magnus University

Hirsch Oscherowitsch was born in 1908 in Panevėžys

Osherovich was born in 1908 in Ponevezh, then in the Russian Empire and now in Lithuania. During World War I his family was exiled with other Jews to the Donbas region. They returned to Ponevezh in 1921.

He finished a Hebrew high school in 1928. He then studied law at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas and graduated in 1933.

His poems began to appear in 1934, and he worked for the Yiddish newspaper Di Yidishe Shtime and others. During World War II he fled to the Soviet Union and lived in Alma-Ata before moving to Vilna. In 1949 he was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in a labor camp for anti-Soviet and Zionist nationalist activity.

He was released in 1956 and returned to Vilna, where he kept writing. His play Men and Supermen was staged in 1968, and his collection Sun Walk appeared in 1969.

In 1971 he immigrated to Israel and continued to publish poetry, mostly in Yiddish and once in Hebrew. He received the Fichman Prize, the Itzik Manger Prize and the Prime Minister's Prize for Yiddish literature. He died in Tel Aviv in 1994.