Springtime in the Hospital

Born in poverty in the shtetl of Ostrolenka, Poland, Yisroel Shtern was a Yiddish poet and journalist. Shtern maintained a religious lifestyle from youth into adulthood, attending prominent yeshivas in Slobodka and Lomza. After a brief stint in Vienna, Shtern settled in Warsaw, where he associated with the local musar movement and with Breslov Hasidism. In Warsaw, he published articles and poetry in a wide variety of modernist literary journals and in a range of Bundist and Zionist newspapers. His poetry was noted for its melancholy, gloom, and existential dread as it dealt with themes of death, economic distress, and, paradoxically, the ultimate redemption of mankind. Shtern’s Shpitol lider (Hospital Poems), published in a Warsaw journal in 1923, drew particular praise for its vision of illness, deep religious faith, and the slow passage of time. Shtern figures prominently in the Warsaw ghetto memoirs of Rokhl Oyerbakh, who describes how the poet continued to write even under most despairing conditions. He was murdered at the Treblinka death camp.