Danielis Čarnis

ENThe Jewish writer and poet Daniel Tsharni (or Charney, 1887–1959) was well travelled and lived in many different places, getting to know most of the best-known proponents of Yiddish culture. He himself patronised many young budding writers, for which he has been dubbed ‘an ambassador of Yiddish culture’. Even though Tsharni debuted as a poet and wrote and published poems all his life, he is most noted for his autobiographical work, which wasis often initially serialised in periodicals, and only later published independently. Tsharni often returned to his published work to improve it, so many of the accounts of episodes in his life have several versions. The account of his time in Poland in 1935 and 1936 is found in the 1955 book ‘A Litvak in Poyln’. In this account, his stay in Vilnius takes up several dozen pages. The translation into Lithuanian is published here. After the translation was prepared, it came to light that the Yiddish scholar Gennady Estraikh had previously published Tsharni’s diary fragments, taken from the manuscript held in the YIVO archives in New York, in the newspaper „Forverts“ in 2010. Those extracts from December 1935 and January 1936 are missing in the 1955 publication.