Maurice Samuel

Not to be confused with Maurice Samuels.

Maurice Samuel (February 8, 1895 – May 4, 1972) was a Romanian-born British and American novelist, translator and lecturer of Jewish heritage.

Biography

Born in Măcin, Tulcea County, Romania, to Isaac Samuel and Fanny Acker, Samuel moved to Paris with his family at the age of five and about a year later to England, where he studied at the Victoria University on a 3 year scholarship but did not graduate. He attended classes in chemistry with Chaim Weizmann (with whom he became friends), physics with Ernest Rutherford and a mathematics class with Horace Lamb but found he had neither talent nor interest in the subjects. Flinders Petrie lectured on Egyptology and Samuel recalls that James Frazer (who wrote "The Golden Bough") would occasionally visit the university to give lectures on anthropology. He also took courses in French and English literature as well as courses related to civil service requirements.

His parents spoke Yiddish at home and he developed strong attachments to the Jewish people and the Yiddish language at early age. This later became the motivation for many of the books he wrote as an adult. Eventually, Samuel left England and emigrated to the United States, settling in New York City's Lower East Side. On August 31, 1917 he married 18 year old Marie Syrkin just prior to serving in the United States Army during World War I, however her father, Nahum Syrkin disapproved of Samuel's prospects and quickly arranged to have the marriage annulled. He did allow the couple to remain engaged and they maintained a relationship via correspondence. It eventually cooled and Marie finally broke it off while she was enrolled at Cornell University in February 1919.

A Jewish intellectual and writer, Samuel was known for his role as a polemicist and campaigner against anti-Semitism. Most of his work concerns itself with Judaism or the Jew's role in history and modern society, but he also wrote more conventional fiction, such as The Web of Lucifer, which takes place during the Borgias' rule of Renaissance Italy, and the fantasy science-fiction novel The Devil that Failed. Samuel also wrote the nonfiction King Mob under the pseudonym "Frank K. Notch". He and his work received acclaim within the Jewish community during his lifetime, including the 1944 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for his non-fiction work, The World of Sholom Aleichem. He received the Itzik Manger Prize for Yiddish literature posthumously in 1972. He was also a well known radio personality appearing in discussions on the NBC summer program "Eternal Light: The Words We Live By" from 1953-1971 alongside Mark van Doren where the two discussed the literary and cultural impact of the Bible.

Samuel died in New York City in 1972 at the age of 77.

Published works

Fiction

• The Outsider (1921)
• Whatever Gods (1923)
• Beyond Woman (1934)
• Web of Lucifer (1947)
• The Devil that Failed (1952)
• The Second Crucifixion (1960)

Non-fiction

• You Gentiles (1924)
• I, the Jew (1927)
• What Happened in Palestine: The Events of August, 1929: Their Background and Significance
• King Mob: A Study of the Present-Day Mind (1931)
• On the Rim of the Wilderness: The Conflict in Palestine (1931)
• Jews on Approval (1932)
• The Great Hatred (1940)
• The World of Sholom Aleichem (1943)
• Harvest in the Desert (1944)
• Haggadah of Passover (1947) (translation)
• Prince of the Ghetto (1948)
• The Gentleman and the Jew (1950)
• Level Sunlight (1953)
• The Professor And The Fossil (1956)
• Certain People of the Book (1955)
• Little Did I Know: Recollections and Reflections (1963)
• Blood Accusation: the Strange History of the Beiliss Case (1966)
• Light on Israel (1968)
• In Praise of Yiddish (1971)
• In the Beginning, Love: Dialogues on the Bible (collaboration) (1975)

References

• Who's Who In World Jewry, 1972 edition
• Louis Kaplan, "On Maurice Samuel's twenty-fifth Yahrzeit - death anniversary of Jewish author", Judaism, Fall 1997
• Maurice Samuel Papers Archived 29 July 2012 at the Wayback Machine, Americanjewisharchives.org.

External links

• Maurice V. Samuel at IMDb