Lekh-lekho

Simkhe-Bunem Shayevitsh was born in 1907 in Leczyca, Poland, into a Hasidic family. He relocated to Łódź, where he worked in textiles; a volume of his short stories was scheduled to appear when the war began. Shayevitsh lived with his wife and daughter in abject poverty in the Łódź ghetto, where he emerged as a major poet. Two of his epic poems were discovered after the liberation and published by Nachman Blumental. In August 1944, Shayevitsh was deported in one of the last transports to Auschwitz. He is immortalized as the poet Berkovitch in Chava Rosenfarb’s The Tree of Life.