Der Nister was the pseudonym of Pinchus Kahanovich, a Yiddish author, philosopher, translator, and critic.
17 Facts About Der Nister
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Der Nister's father was Menakhem Mendl Kahanovich, a smoked-fish merchant at Astrakhan on the Volga River; his mother's name was Leah.
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Der Nister received a traditional religious education, but was drawn through his reading to secular and Enlightenment ideas, as well as to Zionism.
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Der Nister moved to Zhytomyr, near Kiev, where he earned a modest living as a teacher of Hebrew at an orphanage for Jewish boys.
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Der Nister was subjected to the increasingly stringent Soviet censorship.
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The then president of the Russian Yiddish Writers Federation, Moyshe Litvakov, initiated a smear campaign at the end of which Der Nister had to renounce the literary symbolism.
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Der Nister tried now to write his literary work within the constraints of prevailing socialist realism and began to write stories.
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Der Nister stopped publishing his original works and earned a living as a journalist.
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Der Nister began working on his real masterpiece: Di Mishpokhe Mashber.
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The manuscript of the third volume, the completion of which Der Nister mentioned in a letter, has been lost.
11.
In 1947, Der Nister made a trip to Birobidzhan, the USSR Jewish Autonomous Region near the Chinese border.
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Der Nister traveled there on a special migrant train, together with a thousand Holocaust survivors, to evaluate the development of the self-governing Jewish settlement in this area.
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In February 1949, Der Nister was one of the last of the Jewish writers arrested.
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The Soviet authorities officially reported Der Nister died on 4 June 1950 in an unknown Soviet prison hospital.
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Der Nister's best-known work, Di mishpokhe Mashber, is a naturalistic family saga.
16.
Der Nister himself was influenced by Rebbe Nachman's Hasidic parables, though this manifests in his fiction, Roskies argues, through a filter of Russian modernism, and authors like Andrei Bely influenced his work.
17.
Der Nister appears as one of the main characters in the novel The World to Come by Dara Horn.