Micah Joseph Lebensohn

Who was Micah Joseph Lebensohn?

Micah Joseph Lebensohn Litvak poet in Hebrew.

His father, the poet Abraham Bär Lebensohn, implanted in him the love of Hebrew poetry, and Micah Joseph began very early to translate and to compose Hebrew songs. He suffered from consumption during the last five or six years of his short life. In 1849 he was in Berlin, and later went to Salzbrunn and other watering-places, where he vainly sought relief from the terrible disease which had attacked him. About the end of 1850 he abandoned all hope of recovery and returned to Wilna, where he lingered until his death.

Lebensohn's poetical works are: Harisut Troya, a translation of the third and fourth books of Virgil's Aeneid after Schiller's German translation; Shire Bat Ẓiyyon, epic poems on Jewish subjects, of which his brother-in-law, Joshua Steinberg, published a German translation entitled Gesänge Zion's; and Kinnor Bat Ẓiyyon, a second volume of the foregoing songs, printed posthumously by his father. The most noted elegies on his death are that by his father, entitled Mikal Dim'ah and J. L. Gordon's allegorical drama, Ho Aḥ, which is placed in the first part of Kol Shire Yehudah.