Abraham Nahum Stencl
Abraham Nahum Stencl (; ; 1897–1983) was a Polish-born Yiddish poet. Life Stencl was born in Czeladź in south-western Poland, and studied at the yeshiva in Sosnowiec, where his brother, Shlomo Sztencl, was rabbi. He left home in 1917; he joined a Zionist community, the HeHalutz Group. His views were not in fact Zionist, but the agricultural work appealed. Late in 1918 he received conscription papers for the Russian Army, and with his father's approval he immediately left Poland. In 1919 he travelled to the Netherlands and worked in the steel industry. He began travelling to Germany, and emigrated to Berlin in 1921 where he met intellectuals and writers such as Franz Kafka and Kafka's lover Dora Diamant. A religious Jew by upbringing, he now led an extreme and spontaneous bohemian life, and became an habitué of the Romanisches Café. Stencl began to write Yiddish poetry in a pioneer modernist and expressionist style, publishing poems from 1925 and several books into the 1930s. His poems were translated into German, and were well reviewed by Thomas Mann and Arnold Zweig. He ran a secretive Polish-Yiddish literary group, and kept in touch with Diamant, until she left in February 1936. Stencl was