In Sand and Water

Hebrew poet and translator Noah Stern was born in Jonava, Lithuania. He immigrated first as a teenager to the United States, where he attended Harvard and was admitted to graduate studies at Columbia. He moved to Palestine in 1935, where he translated for the newspaper Davar and taught in a high school in Tel Aviv. During World War II, Stern served in the Jewish brigade. He translated T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, to good reviews, and Richard Wright’s Black Boy. However, his own works were recognized only after his suicide, two years after serving a five-year term in prison for attempted murder.