Benny Mer (Majersdorf) | Delivered in Yiddish.

“Every Jewish street in Warsaw was a city unto itself,” wrote Isaac Bashevis Singer, and all the more so each suburb of Warsaw. Otwock was quite different from its neighbors. The crown suburb of the “Otwock Line” was, on its western side, a typical Polish-Jewish shtetl, with synagogues, craftsmen, charitable women, and Hasidim – the latter including the Lubavitcher Rebbe and the musical Modzhitser Rebbe whose homes were there. On its eastern side, Otwock was a Warsaw resort town, with refined villas, gardens, forests, and boarding houses. All that attracted distinguished guests, painters, and writers such as Alter Kacyzne, Kadya Molodowsky, Zusman Segalovitsh, Julian Tuwim, Janusz Korczak, and many others. This virtual visit will acquaint the public with the various facets of old Otwock through poems, short stories, and images. This lecture tour by Benny Mer (Majersdorf) is based on the speaker’s newly published Guide to Yiddish Warsaw, 1938.

About the Speaker
Benny Mer (Majersdorf) was born in Tel Aviv in 1971. He is the author of Smocza: A Biography of a Jewish Street in Warsaw (2018), as well as A Guide to Jewish Warsaw, 1938 (2025), and several other works. He has translated into Hebrew from Yiddish the works of Sholem Aleichem, Avrom Sutzkever, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Alexander Spiegelblat, Rivke Basman Ben-Hayim, among others, and has published an anthology of Yiddish poetry in Hebrew translation. Mer served as editor of the literary supplement of Haaretz and of the journal Dafke: Yiddishland and Its Culture. In 2015 he was awarded the Mendele Prize.