Yankev Glatshteyn (1896–1971) is considered one of the giants of American Yiddish letters. Born in Lublin, Poland, he settled in New York at the age of eighteen, working in sweatshops, studying law, and eventually settling in a career as a journalist and poet.
Glatshteyn made a name for himself as a pioneer of radical modernism and founded, alongside the other Yiddish luminaries, the so-called Introspectivist school of Yiddish poetry that prized aesthetic innovation over political or social concerns. After the Holocaust, Glatshteyn’s verse took a decidedly more ideological and at times mournful turn as he tried to come to terms with the destruction of Europe Jewry and its world as he knew it.
