Life
He was raised a Hasidic Jew in Vinnytsia, Podolia (now in Ukraine), but revolted against his violent schoolteachers and cabalist father by aligning himself with the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. His father tried to offset this development by marrying him at the age of fourteen to a twelve year old girl; he drew her away from Hasidism and Kaballah, and his father forced him to divorce and remarry, this time to what Liptzin describes as "a deaf, moronic woman".
Linetzky ran away to Odessa, Ukraine, where he acquired a secular education. Attempting to leave for Germany to continue his education, he was stopped at the border and brought back, a virtual prisoner, to Vinitza. At 23, he managed again to escape, this time to the government-sponsored rabbinical academy at Zhytomyr, where he developed a close friendship with Abraham Goldfaden.
Like Goldfaden and several other Yiddish-language writers of his generation, he came to prominence in the 1860s as a writer for Kol Mevasser; like several others, he had first published in its Hebrew language sister publication Hamelitz. With Goldfaden, he was later involved in several Yiddish language newspapers, including as joint editors of the short-lived weekly Yisrolik (July 1875–February 1876) almost immediately before Goldfaden founded the first professional Yiddish theater troupe.
The pogroms following the 1881 assassination of Czar Alexander II of Russia made Linetzky into an early Zionist. His 1882 booklet America or Israel aligned him with the Hovevei Zion movement, active in the Jewish colonization of Palestine.
Read more about this topic: Yitzkhok Yoel Linetzky
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman.”
—Oswald Spengler (1880–1936)
“It is not enough that our life is an easy one. We must live on the stretch, retiring to our rest like soldiers on the eve of a battle, looking forward to the strenuous sortie of the morrow.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“My advice to people today is as follows: If you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out.”
—Timothy Leary (b. 1920)