LITVIN, A.

LITVIN, A. (pseudonym of Shmuel Hurwitz; 1862–1943) Yiddish journalist, poet, editor, and folklorist. Born in Minsk, he was self-educated. Believing in "redemption through physical labor," he tried to earn a living as street paver, carpenter, and typesetter, while contributing articles on miscellaneous subjects to Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish periodicals. In 1901 he immigrated to the U.S., where he worked in a shoe factory and wrote for Yiddish journals. During the 1905 Revolution, he returned to Russia, edited the Vilna monthly Lebn un Visnshaft (1909–12), and published studies on shomer (1910) and I.M. Dik (1911). Returning to New York in 1914, he wrote for radical and Labor Zionist organs, as well as for the dailies, the Forverts and Morgn-Zhurnal. During travels through the Polish, Lithuanian, and Galician Jewish communities (1905–14) he accumulated vast material on Yiddish folklore, folk characters, and half-forgotten villages, part of which he utilized in his main work Yidishe Neshomes ("Jewish Souls," 6 vols., 1916–17), a panorama of exotic, picturesque Jewish life in preceding generations. Selections from these volumes were translated into Hebrew by A. Kariv and published in 1943. The greater part of Litvin's collection of Yiddish folk songs, folktales, and folk humor was deposited in the archives of yivo in New York and forms a rich source for scholarly research. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Rejzen, Leksikon, 2 (1927), 142–6; LNYL, 5 (1963), 94–7; B.I. Bialostotsky, In Kholem un Vor (1956), 409–16; Kressel, Leksikon, 2 (1967), 263. ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: D. Charney, Barg Aruf (1935), 226–29; Sh. Levin, Untererdishe Kemfer (1946), 323–25; Tolush, Yidishe Shrayber (1955), 179–84. (Sol Liptzin)