Abraham Nahum Stencl

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Abraham Nahum Stencl (Avrom-Nokhem Shtentsl) (1897-1983) was a Yiddish poet.

He was born in Czeladź in south-western Poland. He left home in 1917 and travelled to Holland to join a Zionist community. He began travelling to Germany and emigrated to Berlin in 1921 where he met intellectuals and writers such as Franz Kafka and Kafka's lover Dora Diamant. Stencl began to write Yiddish poetry in a pioneer modernist and expressionist style, publishing several books in the 1920s and 1930s.

Stencl was arrested in 1936 and tortured by the Gestapo. However, he was released and made his escape to the United Kingdom, settling in London, initially in Hampstead, but soon moving to Whitechapel. There, with Dora Diamant, he founded the Literarische Shabbes Nokhmitogs (later known as Friends of Yiddish), a weekly meeting involving political debate, literature, poetry and song, in the Yiddish language. He also edited the Yiddish literary journal Loshn and Lebn, from 1946 to 1981.

When Stencl died in 1983, his only living relative, his great-niece, donated his papers to the School of Oriental and African Studies.

[edit] Works

  • Un du bist Got (c. 1924, Leipzig) as A. N. Shtentsel
  • Stencl, Abraham Nahum, Londoner soneṭn, Y. Naroditsḳi, 1937.
  • Stencl, Abraham Nahum, Englishe maysṭer in der moleray : tsu der oysshṭelung itsṭ fun zeyere bilder in der arṭ-galerye in Ṿayṭshepl, Y. Naroditsḳi, 1942.
  • Stencl, Abraham Nahum, All My Young Years : Yiddish Poetry from Weimar Germany, bilingual edition (Yiddish - English), tr. Haike Beruriah Wiegand & Stephen Watts, intro. Heather Valencia, Nottingham : Five Leaves, 2007.
  • An English translation of one of Stencl's poems, Where Whitechapel Stood is published in Sinclair's London: City of Disappearances, referenced below.

[edit] References

  • Rachel Lichtenstein (2006), "Avram Nachum Stencl", written at London, in Sinclair, Iain, London: City of disappearances, Hamish Hamilton, ISBN 0-241-14299-7.
  • S. S. Prawer (1985), "A.N. Stencl — Poet of Whitechapel", The Times Literary Supplement, 3 May 1985


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