God No Longer Speaks

Yiddish writer and poet Yankev Fridman (also Jakow Frydman) was born in Mlynica, Galicia, the son of the town’s Hasidic rabbi, a scion of the Ruzhiner dynasty. When Fridman was a child, the family moved to Chernivtsi (now in Ukraine), the city with which the poet and his work remain strongly associated. Fridman’s work appeared in the Yiddish press, and he published several highly regarded books of poetry before World War II. Fridman was imprisoned during the war and lived in Bucharest for several years afterward, playing a key role in the revival of Yiddish literature and culture in early postwar Romania. He settled in Israel in 1949. Fridman’s oeuvre has been praised for its mystical quality, drawing on Hasidic lore to weave rich imagery, complex ideas, and heavy emotion in a single poem.