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S.L. Shneiderman (15 June 1906 – 8 October 1996) was a prominent Polish-American Jewish writer, journalist, translator and poet, who wrote in Yiddish and English. As a journalist, he covered 1930s Paris and reported on the Spanish Civil War before immigrating to the United States in 1940. His works in Yiddish, Arthur Szyk (Tel-Aviv: Farlag Y.L. Perets, 1980); Tsvishn shrek un hofenung (Buenos Ayres: Tsentral-Farband fun Poylishe Yidn in Argentine, 1947); and Ven di Visl hot geredt Yidish (Tel Aviv: Y.L. Perets, 1970) were among the “1000 Essential Yiddish Books” noted by the Yiddish Book Center, a prominent American Jewish cultural organization and museum based in Amherst, Massachusetts. His English books include Between Fear and Hope (1947), The Warsaw Heresy (1959), and The River Remembers (1978). Early life and career Shneiderman was born as Szmuel Lejb Sznajderman (in Yiddish: Shemu’el-Leyb Shnayderman) in Kazimierz Dolny in Congress Poland in the Russian Empire.  Shneiderman grew up going to both a religious Jewish elementary school and a Polish middle school. He moved to Warsaw in 1925, to study literature and journalism at the Free Polish University (Polish: Wolna Wszechnica Polska). There, he wrote poems about poverty, unemployment, industrial expansion, the rejection of militarism, and an idealized, pastoral Polish village life. He published two books of poems, Gilderne Feigl (English: Golden Birds) in 1927 and Feyern in Shtot (English: Unrest in Town) in 1932. Some of these poems were reproduced and appeared in the leading Yiddish weekly in Warsaw at the time, Literarische Bletter (English: Literary Pages), edited by Nachman Mayzel. His first few years in interwar Warsaw were marked by a renewal in Jewish creative culture and a flourishing Jewish avant-garde artistic movement. Shneiderman experimented with genres of Yiddish writing beyond poetry, interviewing Polish writers, translating poems and novels into Yiddish, and writing songs for the Yiddish theater. He also took an interest in cinema as a politically powerful art form. In September 1928, Shneiderman published two articles in the first issue of the (short-lived) first Yiddish journal devoted to cinema, Film Velt (Film World), published in Warsaw and edited by Saul Goskin and Mark Tannenbaum. In his first article, “Film has Deep Meaning,” Shneiderman argued that movie making was an important form of cultural mass entertainment and emphasized the social significance of the cinema. His second essay, published under the pseudonym “Emil”, “Behind the Scenes of In the Polish Woods”, narrated the production of the eponymous movie based on the novel by Yosef Opatoshu. In 1933, he married Eileen (Hala) Szymin, née Chaja, (1908–2004), the daughter of Regina and Benjamin Szymin, a major publisher of Hebrew and Yiddish books in Warsaw. After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, her parents, who lived in Otwock, were imprisoned in the Otwock and Warsaw ghettos. They were both killed by the Nazis. Eileen was the older sister of David “CHIM” Seymour, the Polish photojournalist and co-founder of Magnum Photos, famous for his photographs of the Spanish Civil War and of child war refugees after World War II. Eileen devoted herself to preserving and promoting CHIM's work after his death in 1956, including organizing a 1996 exhibit at the International Center of Photography, where she became an honorary trustee. Eileen was a partner in their travels and participated in researching and editing S.L. Shneiderman's writings in both Yiddish and English. The couple moved to Paris in 1933, where he worked as a journalist and correspondent for various Polish and Yiddish daily newspapers. Under the influence of Egon Erwin Kisch, Shneiderman began to write prose. He published his first volume of reportages, Zvishn Nalewkes un Eifel-Turm (English: Between Nalewsky and the Eiffel Tower) in 1935, with a foreword by Kisch, and in Polish Od Nalewek do Wieży Eiffla in 1936. Between 1936 and 1938, Shneiderman reported on the Spanish Civil War and anti-fascist politics in Yiddish. He published his reportages in Krig in Shpanyen: Hinterland (English: The War in the Spanish Hinterland) in 1938, including his brother-in-law CHIM's photographs of the conflict. Some of the pieces Shneiderman published on the Spanish Civil war were later translated into Hebrew in Mandatory Palestine. His coverage earned him the moniker as the “first Yiddish war reporter.” Translations recently appeared in Polish in 2021 and in Spanish in 2023. An English translation is forthcoming in 2024. After the collapse of the Spanish Republic in 1939, Shneiderman spent six months in South Africa as part of a lecture tour, where he considered taking a permanent editorship for the Yiddish newspaper Afrikaner idishe tsaytung (English: African Jewish newspaper) in Johannesburg. Deciding to return to Paris, he stopped and visited Mandatory Palestine (later Israel) for the first time. Amid news of increasing German aggression in Central-Eastern Europe, S.L. Shneiderman and Eileen immigrated to the United States with their young daughter, Helen, in February 1940. After a six-day journey aboard the liner S. S. Manhattan and a week on Ellis Island, they arrived in New York City. After World War II Shneiderman was politically committed to modern Jewish nationalism, Jewish identity, Yiddish culture, and Holocaust memory. After World War II, Shneiderman promoted the publication of Holocaust survivors’ memoirs and testimonies, thereby contributing to making them available to a wider audience. In 1944, he edited the diary of Mary Berg, among the first eyewitness accounts of life and Nazi persecution in the Warsaw Ghetto. Written from the perspective of a teenage girl, Warsaw Ghetto: A Diary was published in English in 1945, and subsequently translated into Hebrew, Italian, and French. Although Mary Berg withdrew from public discussions, her story gained continued interest and was republished in subsequent editions, most recently by Oneworld Publications as The Diary of Mary Berg: Growing up in the Warsaw Ghetto in 2009. Shneiderman also edited and published the diary of Gemma LaGuardia Gluck, after encountering evidence on her arrest and incarceration as a political hostage while covering the 1961 Eichmann trial. Gemma LaGuardia Gluck was the sister of New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. Upon visiting her in Queens, New York, Shneiderman discovered she had kept a handwritten journal of her time in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. S.L. Shneiderman edited the manuscript and published it in 1961 under the title My Story. In 1946, Shneiderman visited the postwar ruins of Poland. Out of this trip came two travelogues, Zvishn Shrek un Hofenung (English: Between Fear and Hope), and Ven di Vaysl hot geredt Yidish (English: The River Remembers, or When the Vistula Spoke Yiddish) published in Yiddish in 1970 and in English in 1978, for which Shneiderman was awarded the Bergen Be.... Discover the Mary Berg Susan Lee Pentlin popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Mary Berg Susan Lee Pentlin books.