SHIMEN VUZEK

SHIMEN VUZEK (b. January 24, 1895)

            He was born in Sluzheve (Służewo), Poland.  He studied in religious elementary school and was a chorister with cantors in Polish cities.  He worked as a coal miner in Essen, Germany, and in 1938 he was taken away by the Germans to Zbonshin (Zbonszyn), Poland.  In 1939 he arrived in Rochester where he worked as a tailor.  He debuted in print with a poem in Moment (Moment) in Warsaw, but only from 1953 did he begin to publish his poems in a series of periodicals: Fraye arbeter shtime (Free voice of labor), Bitokhn (Confidence), Undzer eygn vort (Our own word), and Oyfsnay (Afresh), Zayn (To be)—all in New York; Dorem-afrike (South Africa) in Johannesburg; and others.  He translated poems by Else Lasker-Schüler and Nelly Sachs.

Source: Elvi (Z. Levi), in Dorem-afrike (Johannesburg) (May-June 1980).

Berl Kagan, comp., Leksikon fun yidish-shraybers (Biographical dictionary of Yiddish writers) (New York, 1986), cols. 234-35.