Nachman Meisel, literary critic and editor in Yiddish and Hebrew, died in Afula today at the age of 79. He settled in Israel two years ago.
Born in Kiev in 1887, he began his literary career in Hebrew in Vilna when he was 21 and two years later turned to Yiddish as his literary medium. He was editor of the Literarishe Bleter and a founder of a group which sought to broaden the scope of Yiddish literature in Russia. He visited Palestine in 1936 and wrote two volumes on the life of Isaac Loeb Peretz, the Yiddish classic writer.
He settled in the United States at the age of 50 and became secretary of the Yiddisher Kultur Farband in New York City and editor of its monthly magazine, Yiddishe Kultur. He was a member of the Yiddish Pen Club and a founder of the Yiddish Scientific Institute. He wrote more than a dozen studies of Yiddish writers and on Yiddish interests.
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