Melech Ravitch

• Name — Melech Ravitch • Birth Name — Zechariah Choneh Bergner • Born — 27 November 1893 • Birthplace — Redem, Galicia, Austria-Hungary • Died — 20 August 1976 • Place of death — Montreal, Quebec, Canada • Occupation — Writer, literary scholar, poet, historian of literature • Language — Yiddish • Notable Works — Di Lider fun mayne lider ('The Poems of My Poems', 1954) • Spouse — * Fanya Hartstein • Rachel Eisenberg • Children — Yosl Bergner (son) • Relatives — Herz Bergner (brother)

Bergner was born in 1893 to Efrayim and Hinde Bergner in Radymno, Eastern Galicia. Leaving home at age 14, he served in the Austrian army in World War I and lived in Lemberg and Vienna. Emboldened by the 1908 Czernowitz Language Conference, he became involved in the Yiddishist movement and began writing poetry. Together with a fellow poet Shmuel Yankev Imber, he strove to promote the aesthetic ideals of neo-romanticism in Lviv Jewish literary centres, inspired by Jewish writers such as Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig. His earliest poetry appeared in Der yidisher arbeyter in 1910. Other work of the period included the 1912 collection Oyf der Shvel (On the Threshold) and 1918's Spinoza. From the early 1920s he was an active contributor of poems and essays to major Yiddish periodicals, under the name Melech Ravitch. Moving to Warsaw in 1921, he belonged to Di Chaliastre ("The Gang"), a modernist literary group which included Uri Zvi Greenberg and Peretz Markish. He was a co-founder of the Yiddish literary journal Literarishe Bleter and served as secretary of the Yiddish Writers' Union, which then included Sholem Asch, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and I. J. Singer. He was a vegetarian and patron of the Jewish Vegetarian Society.

Ravitch visited Australia in 1933 to raise funds for the Tsentrale Yidishe Shul Organizatsye (TSYSHO), an organisation of Yiddish schools in Poland, and to investigate the feasibility of resettling European Jewish refugees in the Northern Territory. In 1935 he moved to Melbourne, where he edited the First Australian Jewish Almanac and helped establish the city's first Yiddish school, of which he served as headmaster. After 1938, he moved to Argentina, Mexico, New York City, and Israel, before settling in Montreal, where he lived until his death. He briefly served as head of the Jewish Public Library and revived the Yidishe Folks-Universitet (Jewish People's Popular University), which he ran from 1941 to 1954.