GROPER, JACOB

GROPER, JACOB (1890–1966), Yiddish poet. Born in Mihaileni, Romania, Groper was active in furthering Yiddish culture while studying law at the University of Jassy. After spending most of his life in Romania, mainly in Bucharest, he settled in Haifa in 1964. A participant in the 1908 *Czernowitz Yiddish Conference, he began to write in Romanian, German, and Yiddish, but from 1908 concentrated on Yiddish, his poems appearing from 1914 in periodicals in Vilna, Lemberg (Lvov), Jassy, Bucharest, and London, as well as in anthologies and in the volume In Shotn fun a Shteyn ("In the Shadow of a Stone," 1934). Some of his lyrics were printed in the Roman alphabet and in translation in various Romanian Jewish publications. While he was not a prolific writer, Groper's lyrics, romantic in tone, were orally transmitted among Jewish youth and contributed to raising the prestige of Yiddish in Romania. He was widely known and admired by Jews and Gentiles for his vast culture and brilliant mind as revealed in his improvised talks. By the terms of his will, his collected works were published in Yiddish in Israel with a parallel Hebrew translation (1975); another bilingual volume, of tributes to him, appeared the following year.

bibliography:

Rejzen, Leksikon, 1 (1926), 623–5; lnyl, 2 (1958), 364; S. Bickel, Inzikh un Arumzikh (1936), 100–3; idem, Rumenie (1961), 193–204. add. bibliography: A. Spiegelblatt, in: Di Goldene Keyt, 58 (1967), 199–202; A.B. Yaffe, in: Shevet Romania, 4/5 (1979), 33–7.

[Sol Liptzin]