Solomon simon

Solomon Simon
Author portrait, year unknown
Born	1895 (1895) Belarus, Russian Empire
Died	1970 (1971) (aged 75) Miami Beach, Florida
Occupation	Jewish writer

Solomon Simon (1895—November 8, 1970) was a Jewish author and educator. He published over thirty books, in Yiddish and English, notably his children's books The Wandering Beggar, The Wise Men of Helm, and More Wise Men of Helm. He was also a leading figure of the Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute, a Jewish cultural organization that operated Yiddish secular schools for children.

Simon was born Shlomo Shimonovich in the summer of 1895 in what is now Belarus, in an isolated Jewish shtetl that had some hundreds of Jewish families, located near the Minsk swamps and a Russian railway hub called Kalinkavichy. His childhood, early years, and difficult experiences growing up in Czarist Russia, are vividly described in his two-volume autobiography, which has been translated from Yiddish into English: My Jewish Roots (1954) and In The Thicket (1963). His father, Eruchim Ben-Zion, was a simple shoemaker. The poverty stricken family lived in a small hut where his mother, Mere (Lifschitz), struggled to help make ends meet by baking bagels and rolls.

Shimonovich was the fourth of eight children and, unlike the others, suffered from rickets. As a result, he was forced to crawl about, unable to walk, until he was nearly six. The handicap led to a startlingly imaginative inner life as a child that was later reflected in many of his writings. At age 13 he was singled out for assignment to a Yeshiva in Kremenchuk, and then continued his advanced training at several additional Yeshivas in Poland. His Rabbinical studies were interrupted by his conscription into the Czarist army. Like so many other Jewish emigrants, he fled to America. In 1913 he arrived in New York City, penniless and not knowing a word of English.

The transition from the world of the shtetl changed him forever. He anglicized his name to Solomon Simon' (Shlomo Simon in Yiddish), worked initially as a house painter, served in the U.S. Army in 1918, became a U.S. citizen, graduated from Dental College at New York University (1924), and commenced practicing dentistry. His real love, however, was writing, and from the 1920s on he devoted himself to it, while resorting to dentistry in order to earn a living and support his wife, Lena, and three children, David, Judith (Judith Simon Bloch) and Miriam.

Although he had become fully secular, he felt it essential to assure the survival of Jewish values, culture and traditions in the new generation of Jews growing up in America. To that end, he became a devoted “yiddishist,” viewing the Yiddish language as the singular instrument that could succeed in perpetuating Jewish ideals among secular Jews and their children. He became active in the Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute based in New York City, a secular Jewish organization focused on maintaining evening children’s schools for teaching Yiddish, as well as Jewish culture and history. He served as President of the Institute from 1939 to 1943, 1945–49 and 1952-3; he also played an active role in its Yiddish summer camp, Boiberik, as well as its Yiddish magazine for children and its Yiddish publishing arm.