Life

Stencl was born in Czeladź

Czeladz

Czeladź is a town in Zagłębie Dąbrowskie in southern Poland, near Katowice. Borders on the Upper Silesian Metropolitan Union - metropolis with a population of 2 million. Located in the Silesian Highlands, on the Brynica river ....

 in south-western Poland

Poland

Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...

, and studied at the yeshiva

Yeshiva

Yeshiva is a Jewish educational institution that focuses on the study of traditional religious texts, primarily the Talmud and Torah study. Study is usually done through daily shiurim and in study pairs called chavrutas...

 in Sosnowice

Sosnowice

Sosnowice may refer to the following places:*Sosnowice, Lesser Poland Voivodeship *Sosnowice, Masovian Voivodeship *Sosnowice, Goleniów County in West Pomeranian Voivodeship...

, where his brother was rabbi.

He left home in 1917; he joined a Zionist

Zionism

Zionism is a Jewish political movement that, in its broadest sense, has supported the self-determination of the Jewish people in a sovereign Jewish national homeland. Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the Zionist movement continues primarily to advocate on behalf of the Jewish state...

 community, the HeHalutz

Hehalutz

Hechalutz was an association of Jewish youth whose aim was to train its members to settle in the Land of Israel, which became an umbrella organization of the pioneering Zionist youth movements....

 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

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

 in 1921 where he met intellectuals and writers such as Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...

 and Kafka's lover Dora Diamant

Dora Diamant

Dora Diamant is best remembered as the lover of the writer Franz Kafka and the person who kept some of his last writings in her possession until they were confiscated by the Gestapo in 1933...

. A religious Jew by upbringing, he now led an extreme and spontaneous bohemian life, and became an habitué of the Romanisches Café

Romanisches Café

The Romanisches Café was a café-bar in Berlin well known as a meeting place for artists. It was located on the Kurfürstendamm in the Charlottenburg district...

.

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 Gerrman, and were well reviewed by Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual...

 and Arnold Zweig

Arnold Zweig

Arnold Zweig was a German writer and anti-war activist.He is best known for his World War I tetralogy.-Life and work:Zweig was born in Glogau, Silesia son of a Jewish saddler...

. He ran a secretive Polish-Yiddish literary group, and kept in touch with Diamant, until she left in February 1936.

Stencl was arrested in 1936 and tortured by the Gestapo

Gestapo

The Gestapo was the official secret police of Nazi Germany. Beginning on 20 April 1934, it was under the administration of the SS leader Heinrich Himmler in his position as Chief of German Police...

. However, he was released and made his escape to the United Kingdom

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

, settling in London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

 (from 1944), initially in Hampstead

Hampstead

Hampstead is an area of London, England, north-west of Charing Cross. Part of the London Borough of Camden in Inner London, it is known for its intellectual, liberal, artistic, musical and literary associations and for Hampstead Heath, a large, hilly expanse of parkland...

, but soon moving to Whitechapel

Whitechapel

Whitechapel is a built-up inner city district in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, London, England. It is located east of Charing Cross and roughly bounded by the Bishopsgate thoroughfare on the west, Fashion Street on the north, Brady Street and Cavell Street on the east and The Highway on the...

. There he met again with Dora Diamant, and founded the Literarische Shabbes Nokhmitogs (later known as Friends of Yiddish), a weekly meeting involving political debate, literature, poetry and song, in the Yiddish language

Yiddish language

Yiddish is a High German language of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, spoken throughout the world. It developed as a fusion of German dialects with Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic languages and traces of Romance languages...

. He found an English translator in Joseph Leftwich

Joseph Leftwich

Joseph Leftwich , born Joseph Lefkowitz, was a British-Jewish critic and translator into English of Yiddish literature. He is known particularly for his 1939 anthology The Golden Peacock of Yiddish poetry, and his 1957 biography of Israel Zangwill.He was one of the 'Whitechapel Boys' group of...

. He also edited the Yiddish literary journal Loshn and Lebn, from 1946 to 1981. Diamant in 1951 defined Stencl's work as a mitzvah

Mitzvah

The primary meaning of the Hebrew word refers to precepts and commandments as commanded by God...

, to keep Yiddish alive.

When Stencl died in 1983, his only living relative, his great-niece, donated his papers to the School of Oriental and African Studies

School of Oriental and African Studies

The School of Oriental and African Studies is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and a constituent college of the University of London...

.

Works

• Un du bist Got (c. 1924, Leipzig) as A. N. Shtentsel
• Stencl, Abraham Nahum, Londoner soneṭn, Y. Naroditsḳi, 1937.
• Stencl, Abraham Nahum, Englishe maysṭer in der moleray : tsu der oysshṭelung itsṭ fun zeyere bilder in der arṭ-galerye in Ṿayṭshepl, Y. Naroditsḳi, 1942.
• Stencl, Abraham Nahum, All My Young Years : Yiddish Poetry from Weimar Germany, bilingual edition (Yiddish - English), tr. Haike Beruriah Wiegand & Stephen Watts, intro. Heather Valencia, Nottingham : Five Leaves, 2007.
• An English translation of one of Stencl's poems, Where Whitechapel Stood is published in Sinclair's London: City of Disappearances, referenced below.