Lamed Shapiro

The Yiddish writer Lamed (Levi-Yehoyshue) Shapiro was born in a shtetl south of Kiev (Kyiv). Making his literary debut in 1903 with the support of Y. L. Peretz in Warsaw, Shapiro soon headed west to London and then the United States, where he published a wrench­ing series of pogrom stories, including “The Cross.” These stories, written following the terrible pogroms of 1905–1906 (although Shapiro had himself experi­enced an earlier episode of anti-Jewish ethnic vio­lence), were recapitulated in still more terrifying form in his two greatest pogrom stories “White Challah” and “The Jewish Government.” Both written in 1919 amid reports of the mass slaughter of Jews in war-torn Ukraine, their engagement with violence and extremes of human behavior, including murder, rape, and sadism, were riveting. But Shapiro also wrote stories of great psychological subtlety and acute sociological observation, such as “Nyu-Yorkish,” a story of Americanization at the intersection of assimilation, desire, sexual commerce, racialization, and popular culture that stands as one of the greatest works of Yid­dish prose written in the United States. In Shapiro’s later years, he tried his hand at writing for the Yiddish press, running restaurants, and inventing a method for producing color film; he died penniless.