Menke Katz

Menke Katz (1906–1991) was a watchmaker, Kabbalist, and Yiddish poet who was born in Lithuania but spent most of his adult life on the Lower East Side of New York City or in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York after a brief stint in Tsfat, a city in the north of Israel known as the birthplace of Jewish mysticism. Katz began his literary career as a member of Proletpen, a group of young leftist Yiddish writers, but quickly broke with them after his first books, Dray shvester (Three Sisters; A. Posy Press, 1932) and Brenendik shtetl (Burning Village; Signal Press, 1938), abandoned socialist realism for surreal and dreamlike visions of shtetl life. Frustrated with the political partisanship of the Yiddish literary world, Katz turned to English, where he published prolifically and to much acclaim. He was also the founder and editor of the Bitteroot Quarterly Poetry Magazine and Mir, a Yiddish-language literary magazine.