L.Shapiro Die Stadt der Toten, Litho cover by Menachem Birnbaum, perished in Holocaust, 1920, exlibris, German

L.Shapiro Die Stadt der Toten, Litho cover by Menachem Birnbaum, perished in Holocaust, 1920, exlibris, German
Lamed Shapiro Die Stadt der Toten und andere Erzaaehlungen, Litho cover by Menachem Birnbaum, perished in Holocaust, 1920, exlibris, in German
Berlin : Welt-verlag, 1920, 64 pp. 19 x 12.5 cm. Jewish exlibris - donation to Israel culture, signed by author in the plate. Condition: cover stained, spine and rear cover damaged; light brown paper. Translated from Yiddish into German by Siegfried Schmitz.
Levi Yehoshua Shapiro (born 1878, died 1948), better known as "Lamed Shapiro", (lamed is the Yiddish name of the letter ל), was an American Yiddish author. His stories are best known for such themes as murder, rape, and cannibalism
He was born on March 10, 1878, in Rzhyshchiv, Ukraine. In 1896, he traveled to Warsaw, struggled to work for two years, then returned to Ukraine. He experienced a pogrom, fell in love and attempted suicide, and was later conscripted into the Imperial Russian Army. These experiences would influence much of his rather dark, fictional themes. Shapiro returned to Warsaw in 1903, and I. L. Peretz helped him publish his first literary works: Di Fligl ("The Wings"); and, the next year, a longer story called Itsikl Mamzer ("Little Isaac the Bastard"), published in a journal edited by Avrom Reyzen. To Peretz he would dedicate one of his works, Smoke, a tale of the Old World (Peretz would serve as an early benefactor of another famous Yiddish writer, Der Nister).
Shapiro left for America in 1905. He stayed for a year in London, where he befriended the Hebrew writer Yosef Haim Brenner. After arriving in New York in 1906, and working for The Forward, he began publishing his gruesome pogrom tales: "The Kiss" (1907); "Pour Out Thy Wrath" (1908); "The Cross" (1909); "In The Dead Town" (1910). Shapiro's work marks a break from that of the three classic Yiddish writers in its foregrounding of violence and psychological realism, rather than satirical commentary. Shapiro subsequently returned to Warsaw for a year, then returned permanently to the United States in 1911. By 1919, Shapiro had written what are considered his two greatest pogrom stories: "White Challah" and "The Jewish Government."[2] The two stories "remain some of the most aesthetically nuanced and psychologically complex treatments of the pogrom theme in modern Jewish literature."[3]
Shapiro and his family moved to Los Angeles in 1921. His wife, Freydl, died there in 1927, and he then returned to New York.[2] Back in New York yet again, Shapiro worked at several literary periodicals, was active in the Communist party, and was employed by the Federal Writers' Project in 1937. Shapiro returned to LA in 1939, where he lived at 544 Heliotrope Drive in East Hollywood.
Shapiro died in Los Angeles in 1948 while living in a friend's garage.[4] He died an alcoholic and poor. He was buried at the Mount Zion Cemetery in East Los Angeles next to his wife and his tombstone was inscribed with the words: "Lamed Levi Shapiro, Author of the Yiddishe Melukhe"
Menachem Birnbaum (born 1893 in Vienna, died probably 1944), was an Austrian Jewish book illustrator and portrait painter. Birnbaum was the second son of the Jewish philosopher Nathan Birnbaum and his wife Rosa Korngut. Birnbaum married Ernestine (Tina) Esther Helfmann, with whom he had two children: Rafael Zwi and Hana. Birnbaum lived in Berlin from 1911 until 1914 and again from 1919 until 1933. He then emigrated to the Netherlands. In the spring of 1943 he was arrested by the Gestapo and with his relatives transported on 10 March 1943 to a Nazi concentration camp - presumably Auschwitz. Menachem was seen alive and spoken to in Auschwitz in October 1944 by a Dutch Jewish survivor, who told this to his brother Uriel Birnbaum in Holland after WW2. His family Tina, Rafael Zwi, and Hana Birnbaum were killed earlier (probably in Auschwitz also). Therefore he must have died between October 1944 and January 27, 1945 - when Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviets. {{cite for the three previous sentences: letter from Uriel Birnbaum to Regina Weinreich dated 6 January, 1946, in the Beatrice Weinreich collection, University of Michigan library. Also letter dated 6 August, 1945 from Henri van Leeuwen to S.A. Birnbaum in the Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Archives Toronto>}}. It is likely that he died during or just before the Death March from Auschwitz in mid-January, 1945. Therefore the information that he died in Sobibor extermination camp is incorrect. It is based solely on an unconfirmed assumption by the Red Cross that the trains from the German holding camp at Westerbork, Holland went to Sobibor on that day.