Simchah Gutman, better known by his pen-name, Ben Zion Gutman, died of cancer this morning at Tel Aviv at the age of 62.
Ben Zion Gutman, who was well known both as a Yiddish and a Hebrew novelist, poet and pedagogue, was born in Bessarabia. I. L. Peretz was the first to encourage him in his early literary efforts. He did his most important work, however, in Hebrew, being a member of the Hebraist group in Odessa, where he went in 1899, to work as a teacher. In the end he gave up writing in Yiddish altogether, and devoted himself exclusively to Hebrew. In pedagogies he was one of the first to start the Ivrith B’Ivrith method of teaching Hebrew.
He had been living in Palestine since 1905.
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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.
