ZEITLIN, AARON

ZEITLIN, AARON (1898–1973), Hebrew and Yiddish writer. The son of hillel zeitlin , he grew up in Gomel, Vilna, and Warsaw. His early poetic works were lyrical; later, philosophic concepts appeared in his verses, and then followed an attempt to express mystical religious insights within formal rhythmic structures. A philosophic aesthete deeply rooted in Jewish tradition and mysticism, Zeitlin's lyrics are often contemplative liturgic hymns. Well versed in world literature, Zeitlin wrote with equal facility in Hebrew and Yiddish. His early Hebrew poems and essays appeared in the periodicals Ha-Tekufah and Ha-Shilo'aḥ. His first volume of Yiddish lyrics Shotns Oyfn Shney and his longer poems Metatron were published in 1922. Four years later he became literary editor of the Warsaw Yiddish daily Unzer Ekspres. Zeitlin's poems are filled with visions of true and false messiahs. His drama Yakob Frank (1929), written in Yiddish, dealt with two conflicting approaches to God, the one espoused by the God-seeker jacob frank , a disciple of the false messiah Shabbetai Ẓevi , and the other by the God-finder Israel Ba'al Shem Tov , founder of Ḥasidism. Another drama was Brenner (1929), whose protagonist was J.H. Brenner , the Hebrew poet who in his younger years had come under the influence of Hillel Zeitlin and was later murdered in the Jaffa pogrom of 1921. Zeitlin's play, In Keynems Land ("In No Man's Land"), appeared in Warsaw in 1938. He prophetically described the sadism of the German militarists and warned of the horrors to follow. When the catastrophe came, he was saved; in the spring of 1939, maurice schwartz invited him to New York for the Yiddish Art Theater's premiere of his play. The war prevented Zeitlin's return to his family, all of whom were killed by the Nazis. As contributor to the New York Yiddish daily Jewish Morning Journal and professor of Hebrew literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Zeitlin profoundly influenced the American Jewish scene after World War II. His Hebrew essays, poems, and lectures during his frequent visits to Israel similarly influenced Hebrew literature. A novel set in Palestine, Brenendige Erd ("Burning Earth," 1937), dealt with nili , the World War I Jewish espionage group. His dramatic poem Bein ha-Esh ve-ha-Yesha ("Between Fire and Deliverance," 1957) focused on the destruction of European Jewry. Zeitlin's collected poems, Gezamelte Lider (vols. 1 and 2, 1947, vol. 3, 1957), contained the revised versions of the verse he wished to see preserved. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Rejzen, Leksikon, 3 (1929), 297–9; M. Ravitch, Mayn Leksikon (1945), 203–5; S. Bickel, Shrayber fun Mayn Dor (1958), 121–32; Z. Zylbercweig, Leksikon fun Yidishn Teater, 4 (1965), 3647–51; S. Liptzin, Maturing of Yiddish Literature (1970), 172–5; Waxman, Literature, 4 (1960), 1249–50.