Abstract

Although Uri Zvi Grinberg had published poetry in both Hebrew and Yiddish from 1912 onward, it was with the appearance of the Yiddish volume Mefisto in 1921 and his Albatros in 1922–1923 that the new idiom, expressionism was introduced. In seeking to explain the transformation of Uri Zvi Grinberg from a minor romantic lyric poet in Yiddish and Hebrew into an Expressionist bard who emerged in the 1921 Mefisto, critics have advanced a number of elaborate and sometimes contradictory theories. His own special “creative force” in interplay with the highly eclectic dynamic of Yiddish modernism, spurred a turning point, which witnessed the return of his artistic attention, as of his confreres to the realities of the phenomenal world, in confrontation with symbolism and impressionist art.