David Pinski, world-prominent Jewish author and playwright, died late last night at his home on Mt. Carmel, He was 87. The municipality here, proclaiming official mourning, announced that the City of Haifa has taken care of the arrangements for the funeral.
David Pinski was considered the last of the generation of the great Yiddish writers of the stature of I. L. Peretz, Sholom Asch and Sholom Aleichem. Born in Mohilev, Russia, in 1872, he started writing while still an adolescent, soon joined the stream of young Jewish intellectuals who made their way to Warsaw and worked alongside Peretz as pioneers in the development of the new, modern, vital Yiddish literature.
By 1896, when he was 24, and already a writer of repute, he went to Berlin, where he attended the University. In 1899, at the invitation of the “Ovend Blatt” in New York, he came to the United States, becoming the newspaper’s literary editor.
From the time he came to the United States, until he moved to Israel after the State was established, Mr. Pinski was one of the foremost literary figures in the Jewish world, writing in Yiddish but widely translated into Hebrew, English, and many other languages. He was particularly noted as a playwright. His play “The Treasure” was produced in New York by the Theatre Guild in 1915. Another of his plays produced in English, in 1926, was “The Final Balance.” On the Yiddish stage, his plays, from one-actors to full-length dramas, we are extremely popular.
A member of the Poale Zion since his youth, Mr. Pinski was for years president of the Jewish National Workers Alliance, the fraternal organization now known as the Far-band-Labor Zionist Order.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
