Peretz Miransky

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Peretz Miransky (March 24, 1908 – July 10, 1993) was a Yiddish poet and writer of fables. He became the youngest member when he joined the Yiddish literary group Yung-Vilne in 1934.

He lived with his family in Shnipishok, near Vilna, from 1924 to 1935. He was the third of six children, and only his sister survived the Holocaust. A teacher, Moshe Kulbak, inspired him to write poetry, and Eliezer Shteynbarg encouraged his work in fables. Miransky published his first fables on February 2, 1934, in Vilner tog and later in other journals around Poland.

When Vilna was moved to Lithuania in 1938, he moved to Vidzy, Poland, where he married and had a child who did not survive the Holocaust. He returned to Vilna when it came under Russian control again. In 1941, as the Nazis advanced, he fled to Russia and spent the war years in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, where he married Leah (Lola) Bluds.

Miransky returned to Vilna in 1944 to find surviving family. In 1946, he and his wife reached the Berlin displaced persons camp Templehof, where their eldest daughter Libi was born on December 13, 1946. He helped edit the journal Unzer Lebn (Our Life) there.

In 1948 the family moved to Paris while waiting for immigration to Canada. Their second daughter Khane (Anna) was born at sea on October 12, 1948. They lived in Montreal from 1949 to 1955, where their son Rami was born on June 29, 1955, before moving to Toronto later that year. Leah died in 1970, and Miransky married Saba Fried in 1976.

His first book, A Likht far a groshn, appeared in Montreal in 1951. Many of his poems and fables were written before and during World War II and later reconstructed from memory. His work appeared widely in the Yiddish press and journals, including Keneder Odler, Goldene Keyt, Svive, Tsukunft, Afn Shvel, Yidishe Kultur, and Forverts. A bilingual English–Yiddish edition, Peretz Miransky: Selected Poems and Fables, was published in 2000 (edited by Anna Miransky).

Some of his poetry and fables have been set to music, appearing in Still Soft Voiced Heart: New Yiddish Lieder (2002) and The Flying Bulgar’s Klezmer Band: Sweet Return (2003).