Solomon Ettinger
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Solomon Ettinger (1800/03—1855/56; also written as Shlomo Ettingher or Shloyme Ettingher, etc.) was a 19th century Yiddish- and Hebrew-language playwright, poet and writer of songs and fables.
The exact dates of Ettinger's life are uncertain, but it is known that he was born at the beginning of the 1800s in Warsaw. By 1795, Poland had been partitioned between Prussia, Russia and Austria. The capital was in the Prussian partition, but the residents spoke primarily Polish and the city had a large Jewish population.
Young Shloyme (Solomon) lost his parents at an early age and was raised by his grandfather, a rabbi, whom he described as open-minded and tolerant. As was common at the time, the young man had an arranged marriage at the age of fifteen and was apprenticed to various professionals. Ettinger further related that his attempts at a career were all failures. Eventually, he traveled to Lemberg in the Austrian partition to study medicine at its renowned University. After years of study, he graduated with a medical degree and returned to his native region, but was unable to practice as a physician. By 1832, Warsaw and surrounding areas, including the city of Zamość, where Ettinger now lived, had been incorporated into the Russian partition, the most intolerant of the three. Anti-Jewish pogroms were frequent and Ettinger's degree was declared invalid, because it came from an ostensibly foreign institution.
After numerous attempts at other professions, including an unsuccessful period with an agricultural group, Ettinger settled in Odessa, a Black Sea port with a substantial number of Jewish residents, and attempted to make a living as a writer, while supplementing his income with various short-lived jobs. Much of what he has written is now lost, but his sketches, poetry and songs were published in various Yiddish-language periodicals of the time. His only surviving dramas are fragments of two plays Der Feter fun America (The Uncle from America) and Freleche Yungeleut (Carefree Youth) found after his death, and the play that keeps his name alive and is still performed by Yiddish theaters around the world, Serkele which, while written when Ettinger was in his twenties, and performed during his lifetime, was first published posthumously in 1861.
Serkele is one of the most renowned plays in the entire repertoire of the Yiddish theater and owes its high reputation to its strong sense of form, sound and rhythm. The characters are delineated in a masterful style comparable to that of the most esteemed dramatists and its outlook remains alive and fresh after 180 years. The Yiddish linguistic stylization in Serkele and the two fragmentary plays is crisp and self-assured, displaying a mastery of the medium. Renowned Yiddish playwrights who flourished immediately after Ettinger, such as Abraham Goldfaden and Jacob Gordin have written how much they were influenced by Serkele.
Solomon Ettinger apparently died in the mid-1850s when he was in his early to mid-fifties. No clear details have emerged as to the date or circumstances of his death. Such writings of his that did survive were preserved by his family and published posthumously, in most cases, decades after their author's death.
