Israel Emiot
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Israel Emiot (1909 – March 7, 1978) was the pen name of Israel Goldwasser or Israel Yanofsky, a Yiddish poet and writer who was born in what is now Poland, later lived in the Soviet Union, and spent his last two decades in Rochester, New York.
Emiot was born in 1909 in Ostrów Mazowiecka, then part of Congress Poland within the Russian Empire. The town became part of independent Poland after World War I. His father emigrated to the United States in 1919, but his mother stayed behind. Emiot published his first writing in 1926, and brought out four books of poetry during the 1930s.
When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Emiot and his wife and children fled east to the Soviet Union; his mother remained and was killed during the war. In 1944, he was sent to work as a journalist in Birobidzhan, the autonomous region set up for Jews in Siberia. Within a few years, as the climate for Jewish writers in the Soviet Union worsened, he was convicted of trumped-up crimes and sentenced to ten years of hard labor, which he served at a camp near Taishet.
After his release, he returned to Poland, and soon after emigrated to the United States, where his wife and children were living in Rochester. He spent his last decade and a half as writer-in-residence at Rochester's Jewish Community Center.
