Samuel Niger (Charney), famous Yiddish author, literary critic and editor, died this week-end at the age of 72 after a sudden heart attack. Funeral services, arranged by a memorial committee consisting of many of the outstanding Jewish writers in the country, will be held Wednesday.
Born in Dukor, near Minsk, young Charney came to the United States soon after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. He had been one of the founders of the Labor Zionist movement in Russia, studied at the Universities of Berlin and Berne, edited various literary journals in Vilna, and founded in that city the Literarische Monatschriftn, a monthly devoted to the championing of Yiddish literature. As early as 1907, he attracted wide attention through his criticism of Russian literature and through a critique of the work of Sholom Aleichem.
In New York, he joined at first the staff of the Jewish Daily Forward, and then associated himself with the Jewish Day with which he worked for 35 years. He was the author of about 20 volumes of literary analysis, criticism and literary history in Yiddish. Hebrew and Russian, and one of the editors of the Jewish Encyclopedic Handbooks. He also taught at the Jewish Teachers Seminary.
One of the founders of the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, he had attended a small meeting of leaders of Yivo Saturday night, and was on his way home in Brooklyn when he collapsed of a heart attack on a platform of the Broadway subway line. He died within a short time after being removed to Harlem Hospital, without regaining consciousness. He was a brother of the late Charney-Vladeck, noted Socialist leader and former manager of the Jewish Daily Forward.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
