If I Forget Thee (Tsiyon tamati)

The novelist and poet Menachem Mendl Dolitzki was born in Białystok in the Russian Empire (today in Poland). After finishing his traditional education, Dolitzki married (at age seventeen) and began reading maskilic literature. This inspired him to visit the writer Peretz Smolenskin in Vienna who published Dolitzki’s first Hebrew narrative poem in 1878. That meeting encouraged Dolitzki to work as a Hebrew tutor and writer. In 1882, he moved to Moscow, where he flourished as a Hebrew poet, essayist, and novelist. The 1891 expulsion of Moscow’s Jews drove him to emigrate and settle in New York. Distant from his fellow Ḥibat Tsiyon activists and and increasingly out of fashion, his writing was less well received in America. Nonetheless, Dolitzki continued to write novels, plays, and poems in Hebrew and Yiddish under the pseudonym M. Volfovich.