SCHNAPPER, BER

SCHNAPPER, BER (1906–?), Yiddish poet. Born near Lemberg, the son of a poor cobbler, he was associated with the Galician Neo-Romantics whose center was Lemberg. His first book of lyrics Opshoym ("Scum," 1927) was influenced by his townsman, the poet M.L. Halperin\>\> . In gray images and pessimistic tones, it depicted the small, decaying villages with their crooked streets and crumbling houses. In his last lyric collections, Mayn Shtot ("My City," 1932), Mayse un Lid ("Story and Poem," 1934), and Bloe Verter ("Blue Words," 1937), the mood was more nostalgic. "Lid tsu a Shtekn" ("Song to a Cane"), written on the eve of World War II, when Polish hooligans were attacking Jews with their canes, is an expression of the Jewish people's protest to heaven that a tree branch designed by God to blossom was being transformed by man into a club with which to split skulls. New poems continued to appear in journals into 1940. It is not clear when and where he died. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: M. Ravitch, Mayn Leksikon (1945), 264–6. ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: LNYL, 8 (1981), 748 (Melech Ravitch / Jerold C. Frakes (2nd ed.)