My Childhood Years

Born in 1880 to a family of flour millers outside of Kleshtshel (Kleszczele), a town then part of the Russian Empire and now in northeast Poland, Peretz Hirshbein was a Yiddish playwright, novelist, journalist, travel writer, and stage director whose work was pivotal to the development of Yiddish theater in the early twentieth century. The rustic setting of his youth provided the backdrop for much of his writing, including his two-part memoir, My Childhood Years, and a series of naturalistic plays he wrote in the 1910s that are considered masterpieces of the genre. Hirshbein spent twenty years traveling the world together with his wife, Esther Shumiatcher-Hirshbein, whom he married in 1918. In the mid-1930s, the couple settled in Los Angeles, where Hirshbein died in 1948.