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Morris
(Moshe) Meyer
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M. was born on 2 January
1878 in the village Darmeneshty (Dărmăneşti), Bakoy (Bacău)
district, Rumania, into a Chasidic family. He received a
religious education and also learned in a Rumanian
school, then in a gymnasium in Bakoy, but due to
economic conditions he quit his studies and became a
worker in a [plates/sheet=blekher] factory in Bucharest.
At the same time he educated himself again as an
autodidact, and at the age of eighteen he went on to
publish articles about workers and Jewish national
matters, as well as skits in the Rumanian language. In
1898 he debuted with songs and skits in Yiddish, and in
1911 he edited in Bucharest a radical unionist weekly
page "Dgl mkhnh yehuda", in which he was the first in
the Yiddish journalism to develop Poaeli Zion's ideas.
In 1902 he came to England
and here became a professional journalist, at first as a
fellow worker, then as an editor of various periodical
issues. Since 1913 he has been appointed as an editor of
the daily London newspaper "Di tseyt" (and from 1914
also of the "Abend neyes").
M. also was involved in a
wide-ranging social career and had manifested a special
interest for Yiddish theatre: besides his many reviews
under his own name and under the pseudonym Shtekheyzen
and Kritikus, he also had translated the following
plays: "Der bloyer foygl, oybershpil in five acts and
ten scenes, translated from the original French by
Morris Meyer, issued by |
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the English-Yiddish
publisher, London, 1910" [191 pp., 16°], Moliere's "Di
Kopetkes Les Precieuses Ridicules, a comedy translated
by Morris Meyer, with a scene of [ferfeser] and [forvart]
from a translation issued by "Idishen zhurnal", London"
[48 pp., 16°] and the one-acters "Number 80" and "Begnadigung"
by Herman Heyermans.
Furthermore, M. translated
for Zigmunt Feinman Shakespeare's "The Merchant of
Venice [Shylock] and adapted for him the play "Dos
sheyne shfrhle" and (from Rumanian) "Journalism and
Actors", as well as Gutzkov's "Uriel Akosta" for the
Yiddish Folks Theatre in London (1912). All of the
translations were performed.
In the "Morris Meyer's
Jubilee Supplement" to "Di tseyt" (London, 2 January
1928), M. published his "Ur tsion, prologue to a drama
in three acts".
M. also was literary
[beyrat] for London's Yiddish Folks Theatre.
M. E.
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Z. Reyzen --
"Lexicon of the Yiddish Literature", Vol. II,
pp. 388-394.
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"Morris meyers
jubileum-beylage", to "Di tseyt", London, 2
January 1928.
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