My First Day in the Twentieth Century

Modernist Yiddish poet, essayist, vegetarian, and cultural icon Melekh Ravitch (born Zekharye-Khone Bergner) was born in Radymno, Galicia (now Poland). He served in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I and moved to Warsaw in 1921, where he and the poets Uri Zvi Greenberg and Peretz Markish established the expressionist literary group called Di Khalyastre (The Gang). From 1924 to 1934, Ravitch was the executive secretary of the Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists in Warsaw, at 13 Tłomackie Street, which later inspired his biographical sketches of twentieth-century Yiddish writers. Ravitch, a world traveler, ultimately settled in Montreal in 1940, where he perfected the genre of the autobiographical vignette.