Jacob Adler, the Yiddish humorist, who was known to the readers of the Jewish Daily Forward as B. Kovner, died yesterday at the age of 101 in a nursing home in St. Petersburg, Fla. Funeral services will be held tomorrow at Temple Beth Sholem in Gulfport, Fla., a congregation he helped found after he moved to Florida in 1931.
Born in Galicia, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Mr. Adler came to the United States at the age of 17 and joined the Forward staff in 1895 where he wrote a regular column. One of the humorous characters he created was Yente Telebende, which roughly translated means a gossipy battle-ax who is involved in everyone’s affairs and is the swift courier of good news and bad. The term became a house-hold word among the Yiddish-speaking population.
During his literary career Mr. Adler wrote 18,000 poems, more than 30,000 humorous articles, numerous plays and about a dozen books. Many of his works were translated into German, Polish, Hebrew, Hungarian and English. One of his stories, “Why Doesn’t Hellil Move,” was translated into Italian in 1919 by Enrico Caruso. Prior to writing for the Forward, he had an unsuccessful five-year career as a tailor.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
