GOTTLIEB, JACOB

GOTTLIEB, JACOB (Yankev; 1911–1945), Yiddish and Hebrew poet, short story writer, and essayist. Born in Kovno, Lithuania, Gottlieb was a descendant of the hasidic rabbis of Nowy Sacz. He published his first poem at age 14 and contributed to numerous East European Yiddish periodicals. His first poetry collection, published at age 20, proved his mastery of various lyric styles as well as of blank verse. His poems were characterized by mystic imagery and treated universal themes such as love and nature, as well as social and national subjects. He envisaged a coming world decline and another Jewish catastrophe. Three additional volumes of lyrics appeared in 1933, 1936, and 1938, along with a study of H. Leivick\>\> in 1939. With the outbreak of World War II, Gottlieb fled eastward from the Nazis, and survived the war years in Mari (Turkmenistan), where he died of typhus in 1945. A posthumous selection of his poems, Geklibene Lider ("Selected Poems"), was published in Montreal in 1959. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: LNYL, 2 (1958), 18; J. Leftwich (ed.), The Golden Peacock (1961). (Melech Ravitch / Marc Miller (2nd ed.)