Isaiah Spiegel

Isaiah Spiegel was born in 1904 in Bałuty-Doły

Spiegel was born in 1906 in the poor Bałuty district of Łódź, to a family of poor craftsmen. He studied in a cheder, finished a public school and then took teacher training courses. Until 1939 he taught literature in the schools of the Bund education network.

He began publishing poems and stories in 1922 and belonged to the circle of Yitzhak Katzenelson and Moshe Broderzon. During World War II he lived in the Łódź Ghetto, where he wrote stories and hid them. He was sent to Auschwitz, survived, and after the war found his hidden manuscripts in Łódź.

From 1945 to 1948 he taught at the I. L. Peretz school in Łódź, and later lived in Warsaw. In 1951 he moved to Israel with his wife and settled in Givatayim. He worked as a clerk in the Finance Ministry until 1964 and kept writing in Yiddish.

He won the Itzik Manger Prize in 1972 and the Fichman Prize in 1975. He died in Tel Aviv in 1990 and was buried in Kiryat Shaul cemetery. His archive is held at the National Library in Jerusalem.