The American Yiddish writer S. L. Shneiderman has been awarded the 1980 Atran Prize for Yiddish Literature. The award, established by the Congress for Yiddish Culture in New York, is distributed annually to three Yiddish writers in different countries. The other two recipients for 1980 are I. Yanasovitch in Israel and Shlomo Suskovitch in Argentina.
Shneiderman has had a distinguished career as a writer and journalist for the last 50 years in Poland, France and the United States. Among his highly acclaimed books in Yiddish and English are: “War in Spain” (1938); “Between Fear and Hope” (1947); “The Warsaw Heresy” (1959); “When the Vistula Spoke Yiddish” (1972), and its English version “The River Remembers” (1978). He is also the author of two volumes of poetry and two monographs in Yiddish about the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg (1968) and the painter-miniaturist Arthur Szyk (1980).
Shneiderman conceived and wrote the narration for the film “The Last Chapter,” depicting the rise and fall of the 1000-year-old Jewish community in Poland; he edited the first diary of the “Warsaw Ghetto” by Mary Berg, translated into eight languages; and the war memoirs of Germma LaGuardia Gluck, sister of New York City’s Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. Shneiderman is the past president of the Yiddish P.E.N. in New York.
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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.
