Avrom Nokhem Sten­cl was born in 1897 to a fam­i­ly of rab­bis in the town of Czeladź, in what is now Poland. After a stu­dious ado­les­cence at yeshi­va, he embraced a sec­u­lar life and took an inter­est in agri­cul­ture. In 1919, he fled mil­i­tary con­scrip­tion, first to the rur­al Nether­lands, and then, in 1921, to Berlin, where he set out to become a poet. ^{1 1}Pinkhes Zaglem­bie, ed. J. Rapa­port, (Melbourne/​Tel Aviv: Hameno­ra for the Zaglem­bie Soci­ety, 1972), 256. 

Dur­ing his fif­teen years in the city, Sten­cl pub­lished an astound­ing nine­teen books ^{2 2} Accord­ing to Arndt Beck’s unpub­lished bib­li­og­ra­phy. in Yid­dish (most­ly of poet­ry). He became well-con­nect­ed in the vibrant Yid­dish lit­er­ary scene at that time, but his pover­ty and adven­tur­ous nature led him all over the metrop­o­lis, to soup kitchens, home­less shel­ters, prayer rooms, grave­yards, squats, a stu­dent union, an art school, even Moabit prison (he lacked res­i­den­cy papers) and out­ward to the coun­try­side for more farm work. Thus began a long adult­hood as an insider-outsider.

In 1936, Sten­cl escaped Nazi Ger­many and set­tled in London’s East End, where he soon became a fix­ture in the local Yid­dish cul­tur­al scene, host­ing a salon every Sat­ur­day afternoon ^{3 3} These ​“lit­er­ary Sat­ur­day after­noons,” host­ed by the Friends of Yid­dish in var­i­ous venues, last­ed more than sev­en decades until 2011. and pub­lish­ing the jour­nal Loshn un Lebn for more than four decades, hawk­ing it from his own coat pock­ets at Jew­ish gath­er­ings. ^{4 4} All issues of Loshn un Lebn have now been dig­i­tized and are now avail­able online via SOAS at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don. Many of Stencl’s papers have also been dig­i­tized, avail­able at the SOAS Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tions under the key­word ​“Sten­cl.” Just as he was the last Yid­dish poet to leave the Ger­man cap­i­tal, he clung loy­al­ly to the Yid­dish enclave of Whitechapel (his ​“Jerusalem of Britain”) long after most of its Jews had migrat­ed to north­ern bor­oughs and assim­i­lat­ed to Anglo­phone cul­ture. He died there pen­ni­less in 1983, sur­round­ed by Yid­dish books and manuscripts. 

***

For a hun­dred years, A.N. Sten­cl has been hid­ing in plain sight: admired and pro­mot­ed by a few loy­al read­ers, friends, and schol­ars, but over­looked or dis­missed out­right by most of lit­er­ary Yiddishland. ^{5 5} For one analy­sis of Stencl’s absence from the canon, see Jef­frey Gross­man­/Yeyde-Hesh Groys­man, ​“Far­vos ignorirn di lit­er­atur-his­torik­er A.N. Sht­entslen?” [Why do Lit­er­ary His­to­ri­ans Ignore A.N. Sten­cl?], Oks­forder Yidish 1, (1990): 91 – 105. One basic rea­son Gross­man rais­es (92) is that Lon­don lay out­side any of the geo­graph­i­cal cat­e­gories under which Yid­dish writ­ers were grouped, as in Charles Madison’s 1972 sur­vey Yid­dish Lit­er­a­ture: Its Scope and Major Writ­ers. Sten­cl lit­er­al­ly lived off the map. How­ev­er, there are indi­ca­tions that the Yid­dish lit­er­ary estab­lish­ment was aware of ignor­ing his pro­lif­ic out­put. In 1952, Yankev Glat­shteyn acknowl­edged that ​“Giv­en that Sten­cl is very rarely men­tioned, enu­mer­at­ed, or count­ed on the occa­sions when our pal­try pos­ses­sions [in Yid­dish lit­er­a­ture] are tal­lied up, it must be added that such an abun­dance of poems is an immense act of resistence, and it takes a great deal of ener­gy to march ahead with so many poems — in the face of so much silence.” The quote can be found in Glatshteyn’s essay, ​“A yidish­er dikhter in Lon­don,” in his In tokh genu­men: Eseyen 1949 – 1959 (Buenos Aires: Kiem, 1960), 267. 

While in Berlin, Sten­cl had no short­age of old­er, estab­lished friends in the Yid­dish lit­er­ary world. Notably, the lit­er­ary crit­ic Bal-Makhshoves took him under his wing and arranged his first poet­ic pub­li­ca­tions. But for all his cel­e­brat­ed acquain­tances among the literati at the Roman­is­ches Café and the Sholem Ale­ichem Club — writ­ers such as Dovid Bergel­son, Moyshe Kul­bak, Sholem Asch, and Hay­im Nah­man Bia­lik — Sten­cl remained a minor char­ac­ter in that elite, out­ra­geous­ly male scene. ^{6 6} His mem­oirs also fea­ture Daniel Char­ney, Shmuel Lewin, Hersh Dovid Nomberg, Avrom Reyzen, Nokhem Shtif, Elias Tsherikover, Rachel Wis­chnitzer, and numer­ous oth­ers. The almost total male dom­i­na­tion of that scene is worth reit­er­at­ing. Besides Wis­chnitzer, the oth­er woman writer from the scene who is often men­tioned is Rosa Gut­man, but she does not even have a cameo in the mem­oirs. Daniel Char­ney also lists Golde Patz, who wrote Yid­dish sto­ries based on Homer’s epics, and a poet named Sore Reznik. Daniel Char­ney. ​“Dos yidishe berlin (abisl infor­mat­sye),” Lit­er­ar­ishe Bleter, 13 May 1932, pp. 312 – 13. I have only encoun­tered poems by Reznik on p. 318 of that issue and in Berlin­er Bleter issue 2, 1932, and would wel­come more leads about her. These con­nec­tions did not lift his work into the limelight.

Unlike most in that cir­cle, Sten­cl forged lit­er­ary con­nec­tions with both women and Ger­man speak­ers. The poet Else Lasker-Schüler dis­cov­ered him from across the café, and the two embarked on a fer­tile lit­er­ary friendship. ^{7 7} Heather Valen­cia, Else Lasker-Schüler und Abra­ham Nochem Sten­zel. Eine unbekan­nte Fre­und­schaft (Frank­furt am Main: Cam­pus Ver­lag, 1995). His non-Jew­ish Ger­man teacher and roman­tic part­ner, Elis­a­beth Wöh­ler, learned Yid­dish, became one of his trans­la­tors, and ini­ti­at­ed him into the Ger­man lit­er­ary world, paving the way to his fur­ther dis­cov­ery by Thomas Mann and Arnold Zweig. ^{8 8} Ibid., pp. 10 – 11.
So it was that his land­mark poet­ry col­lec­tion Fish­er­dorf (Fish­ing Vil­lage) appeared in trans­la­tion before the Yid­dish original. ^{9 9} Stencl’s sur­name was spelled Sten­zel in Ger­man con­texts, and his first name often ren­dered as Abra­ham. His mid­dle name has been roman­ized in all sorts of ways. Trans­la­tions of his work include: Mein Fis­cher­dorf, trans. Etta Fed­ern-Kohlhaas (Berlin: Kartell lyrisch­er Autoren, 1931); Fis­cher­dorf, trans. Abra­ham Suhl, (Berlin: Kartell lyrisch­er Autoren, 1931); Ring des Sat­urn, trans. Elis­a­beth Wöh­ler (Berlin: Raben­s­presse, 1932). 

Yet Stencl’s nascent career in Ger­man trans­la­tion was cut short by the Nazis’ rise to pow­er, and he did not achieve sim­i­lar crossover suc­cess­es in Eng­lish. Post­war Lon­don was not the same hub of glob­al Yid­dish lit­er­a­ture that Weimar Berlin had been; besides, his peers across the Atlantic and Mediter­ranean were less gen­er­ous read­ers of his expan­sive body of work. Yankev Glat­shteyn was espe­cial­ly unkind: ​“A.N. Sten­cl writes quite a lot, and even if he is not a great pick­er-and-choos­er, in all his abun­dance there is indeed some­thing worth selecting.” ^{10 10} See Glat­shteyn in note 5 above. 

At the end of his life, Sten­cl found an audi­ence in Dovid Katz, a then up-and-com­ing Yid­dish lin­guist six­ty years his junior, who would soon co-res­cue the late poet’s papers from his clut­tered coun­cil flat, archive them at SOAS, and ini­ti­ate a lec­ture series at Oxford in his memory. ^{11 11} Katz has pub­lished an exten­sive bib­li­og­ra­phy of mate­ri­als relat­ed to Sten­cl and his work on his web­site, Defend­ing His­to­ry. The first lec­ture in the series, by S. S. Praw­er, is avail­able online here.

The decades since Stencl’s death have been punc­tu­at­ed by efforts to ​“reawak­en inter­est in this too lit­tle val­ued poet.” ^{12 12} Leonard Prager, The Mendele Review 7 (3), sec­tion 1, 30 Mar 2003.
In 1995, the schol­ar Heather Valen­cia pub­lished a mono­graph about Stencl’s friend­ship with Lasker-Schüler, draw­ing heav­i­ly on his memoirs. ^{13 13} Heather Valen­cia, Eine unbekan­nte Fre­und­schaft. See note 7. The mem­oirs are quot­ed and excerpt­ed in Ger­man trans­la­tion, pp. 84 – 115. She remains the fore­most author­i­ty on his Berlin period. ^{14 14} See her essay ​“A Yid­dish Poet Engages with Ger­man Soci­ety: A. N. Stencl’s Berlin Peri­od” in Yid­dish in Weimar Berlin: At the Cross­roads of Dias­po­ra Pol­i­tics and Cul­ture, ed. Gen­nady Estraikh and Mikhail Kru­tikov (Abing­don, UK: Rout­ledge, 2010), 54 – 72. In the 2000s, The Mendele Review pub­lished sev­er­al arti­cles writ­ten for a memo­r­i­al vol­ume that nev­er appeared. ^{15 15} The full quo­ta­tion by Leonard Prager z”l, already quot­ed in part: ​“Yid­dish stud­ies are rife with unre­al­ized or par­tial­ly com­plet­ed projects. The plan to pub­lish a vol­ume on the Whitechapel poet Avrom-Nokhem Sht­entsl [Abra­ham Nahum Sten­cl] (1897−1983), for which I under­took chief respon­si­b­li­ty, has for legit­i­mate and less legit­i­mate rea­sons been blocked for many years. The present issue … is a con­cert­ed step to reawak­en inter­est in this too lit­tle val­ued poet and to revive the idea of pub­lish­ing Sten­cl and His Cir­cle [ten­ta­tive title] with­in the next year.” Square brack­ets in orig­i­nal. The Mendele Review 7 (3), sec­tion 1, 30 Mar 2003. After that issue, with a bio­graph­i­cal essay by Dovid Katz, Sten­cl was also the focus of issue 7 (4) from April 2003 and issue 11 (9) from August 2007, with essays by Heather Valen­cia and Avra­ham Green­baum.
He has also been fea­tured in the his­to­ri­an Vivi Lachs’s books on Yid­dish London. ^{16 16} Lachs gives an overview of London’s Yid­dish lit­er­ary scene and Stencl’s role in it in her intro­duc­tion, ​“The Lit­er­ary Land­scape of London’s Yid­dish­town and the Fight for the Sur­vival of Yid­dish, 1930 – 50,” in Lon­don Yid­dish­town: East End Jew­ish Life in Yid­dish Sketch and Sto­ry, 1930 – 1950, trans. Vivi Lachs (Detroit: Wayne State Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 2021), 171 – 212. She and Bar­ry Smerin will be releas­ing new trans­la­tions of prose by Sten­cl as part of a forth­com­ing anthol­o­gy. The only pub­lished col­lec­tion of Stencl’s poet­ry in Eng­lish so far, trans­lat­ed by Beruri­ah Wie­gand and Stephen Watts, was released in 2007. ^{17 17} Abra­ham Nokum Sten­cl, All My Young Years, trans. Beruri­ah Wie­gand and Stephen Watts (Not­ting­ham, UK: Five Leaves), 2007. A sec­ond vol­ume is in prepa­ra­tion. These efforts have been cru­cial con­tri­bu­tions toward doc­u­ment­ing, pre­serv­ing, and inter­pret­ing Stencl’s legacy. 

In addi­tion to the work above, exten­sive schol­ar­ship on Sten­cl has been car­ried out by writer and artist Rachel Licht­en­stein, who has led a clus­ter of ambi­tious mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary Sten­cl projects, both per­son­al and insti­tu­tion­al, across sev­er­al coun­tries. Lichtenstein’s projects have includ­ed a radio doc­u­men­tary, a short film, an online ​“mem­o­ry map,” an inter­na­tion­al dig­i­tal archive, and her next book of nar­ra­tive non­fic­tion; her past and present projects are fur­ther detailed in the sis­ter post to this one.

It was Licht­en­stein who first alert­ed Berlin’s con­tem­po­rary Yid­dish com­mu­ni­ty — includ­ing myself — to our own long-lost local poet, by approach­ing Yiddish.Berlin to host her vis­it­ing pop-up exhi­bi­tion on Sten­cl last April. In the short time since, Berlin Yid­dishists have been read­ing Stencl’s work togeth­er every Sunday, ^{18 18} This Yid­dish read­ing group is coor­di­nat­ed by artist and Yiddish.Berlin co-founder Arndt Beck, who has also researched Stencl’s pub­li­ca­tions from his Berlin peri­od and offered input on an ear­ly ver­sion of this intro­duc­tion. and have trans­lat­ed poems into Ger­man, Eng­lish, Hebrew, and Pol­ish. Some of these have already appeared in an impromp­tu zine and sev­er­al online publications. ^{19 19} Zine: A.N. Sten­cl, Gek­libene lider/​Selected Poems, ed. Jake Schnei­der, trans. Arndt Beck, Horst Bern­hardt, Guli Dolev-Hashiloni, Jor­dan Lee Schnee, and Jake Schnei­der (Berlin: Yiddish.Berlin, 2023). Schnee has since pub­lished sev­er­al Eng­lish trans­la­tions at the Loch Raven Review and Dolev-Hashiloni has pub­lished Hebrew trans­la­tions at Iberzets. The oth­ers remain unpub­lished and/​or works in progress. My trans­la­tion of the mem­oirs excerpt­ed here is cur­rent­ly under­way, while Horst Bern­hardt works on the Ger­man trans­la­tion in par­al­lel; Lena Wat­son has also been trans­lat­ing parts of Stencl’s child­hood mem­oirs of Poland.

Soon Sten­cl schol­ars and trans­la­tors from both Berlin and the UK will be gath­er­ing at the Man­ches­ter Poet­ry Library in Novem­ber for a week of dis­cus­sion and col­lab­o­ra­tion. A new ​“Sten­cl Stud­ies” is emerging.

* * *

Stencl’s mem­oirs of his for­ma­tive years in Weimar Berlin, which he seri­al­ized in the pages of Loshn un Lebn, ^{20 20} The install­ments can be found in every suc­ces­sive issue from Jan­u­ary 1967 (no. 421) to June 1975 (no. 435 – 3), all dig­i­tized and acces­si­ble at the link in note 4. make grip­ping read­ing. They are grit­ty and ram­bunc­tious but also con­tem­pla­tive and lyri­cal (he was, after all, a poet). As you will see in the excerpt below, he brings his yeshi­va edu­ca­tion to unlike­ly sur­round­ings — in this case, a dive bar fre­quent­ed by work­ing-class Berlin­ers, includ­ing sex work­ers of mul­ti­ple gen­ders — with star­tling results, such as his rhap­sody to pea soup.

Apart from these texts’ lit­er­ary mer­its and the joy they are to read, they also con­sti­tute a unique his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ment. In my wide read­ing on Berlin’s Yid­dish his­to­ry, I have yet to come across any oth­er book-length work of non­fic­tion that por­trays the heady hey­day of Yid­dish lit­er­a­ture in Berlin. ^{21 21} Writ­ten forty years lat­er in often impos­si­ble detail, these mem­oirs doubt­less ben­e­fit­ed from autho­r­i­al embell­ish­ment. Non­fic­tion is a rel­a­tive term. There are many post­war mem­oirs in var­i­ous lan­guages describ­ing inter­war Jew­ish, and even Yid­dish-speak­ing, Berlin, but none to my knowl­edge describe this insu­lar Yid­dish lit­er­ary scene in depth. One auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal essay that touch­es on the scene from a child’s per­spec­tive is Lev Bergel­son, ​“Mem­o­ries of My Father: The Ear­ly Years (1918 – 1934),” in David Bergel­son: From Mod­ernism to Social­ist Real­ism, ed. Joseph Sher­man and Gen­nady Estraikh, (Lon­don: Rout­ledge, 2007). For anoth­er con­tem­po­rary descrip­tion, see Daniel Char­ney, ​“Dos yidishe berlin (abisl infor­mat­sye),” Lit­er­ar­ishe Bleter, 13 May 1932, pp. 312 – 313. In his own words:

From those flee­ing the pogroms in the Ukrain­ian shtetls, from the famine in the Russ­ian cities, and from the Rev­o­lu­tion, a kind of Jew­ish colony formed itself in the west of Berlin, and the Romanische[s] Café was its par­lia­ment. It was buzzing with famous Jew­ish intel­lec­tu­als and activists, well known Jew­ish lawyers from Moscow and Peters­burg, Yid­dish writ­ers from Kiev and Odessa, with fly­ing par­ty-lead­ers from the extreme left to the extreme right wing — it buzzed like a beehive. ^{22 22}Loshn un Lebn, October/​November 1968, 24. As trans­lat­ed by Heather Valen­cia, Mendele Review7 (4), April 2003, n.p. See also chap­ter 4 of Shachar M. Pinsker, A Rich Brew: How Cafés Cre­at­ed Mod­ern Jew­ish Cul­ture, (New York: NYU Press, 2018). 

Yet Sten­cl was nev­er entire­ly at home in these cir­cles. He was an insid­er-out­sider, a bor­der cross­er, a per­pet­u­al observ­er. Although he fre­quent­ed the well-heeled west, he con­tin­ued liv­ing in dingi­er dis­tricts such as the Sche­unen­vier­tel, Berlin’s oth­er Yid­dish enclave, where most of this excerpt takes place. Cross­ing the city on foot, he was the people’s flâneur: a poet among wag­on dri­vers and a labor­er among poets.

In his mem­oirs, Sten­cl often recre­ates places and expe­ri­ences by chan­nel­ing the poems he wrote about them. In June, as a group of Sten­cl devo­tees retraced his steps in both Lon­don and Berlin, ^{23 23} The results of this project will be pub­lished as an inter­ac­tive ​“mem­o­ry map” web­site includ­ing doc­u­men­tary and archival images, audio record­ings from the walk, and trans­lat­ed quotes from Stencl’s writ­ings asso­ci­at­ed with each place we vis­it­ed. The project was ini­ti­at­ed by Rachel Licht­en­stein. Vivi Lachs researched and led the walk in Lon­don and I did the same in Berlin. his prose put the poet­ry back into his beloved streets: ​“The whole world was such a glo­ri­ous gallery, every dec­o­rat­ed store­front like a hung-up pic­ture — I looked at each per­son with wide-open eyes; I couldn’t look enough!” ^{24 24} From the excerpt below. Loshn un Lebn, Jan­u­ary 1968, p. 21. Trans­lat­ed by Jake Schneider. 

Click here to down­load a PDF of the text and translation. 

This trans­la­tion was sup­port­ed by a grant from the Berlin Sen­ate Depart­ment for Cul­ture and Social Cohesion.