Salamon Dembitzer Collection

Salamon Dembitzer, the son of Herschel and Amalia Dembitzer, was born in Cracow (now Kraków, Poland), at that time part of Austria-Hungary, on December 29, 1888. His grandfather Chajim Nathan Dembitzer was a Talmud scholar and a well-known historian.

Dembitzer spent his earliest years in a small village named Lancut. At 15 he left school and came to Germany, first to Frankfurt, then to Kassel, where he worked as an editor for the Kasseler Volksblatt. In 1910 he went to Berlin, returning there several times until he had to flee it in March 1933.

By the time he was 16 years old Dembitzer already had some of his poetry published. His earliest writings were written in Yiddish, not only with Hebrew letters but also with Latin. Some of his poetry was set to music. Prior to the first World War, Dembitzer lived in Antwerp, but had to return to Germany once the war broke out. Once more he went to Berlin, where his first work of prose Aus engen Gassen, a collection of essays, appeared in 1914.

At the end of 1915 Dembitzer had left Berlin once more and went to Holland where he wrote for two large Amsterdam newspapers, Algemeen Handolsblad and Het Volk. While in Amsterdam he also wrote some articles for the German newspaper Vorwärts, and became a literary writer for this paper when he returned to Berlin in 1920. He also authored articles for several other papers, including Die Welt am Montag, the Berliner Tagblatt, and the Viennese Arbeiter-Zeitung. His short stories especially were often published in German newspapers.

In 1930 Salamon Dembitzer's first novel, Bummler and Bettler, was published as well as a three-act play called Wohlfahrtsamt. In March 1933 Dembitzer fled Berlin for Holland, and would continue to travel through Europe over the next several years in his attempts to escape the Nazis. He stayed in the Netherlands and Belgium before landing in Portugal where he eventually received a visa to New York in 1941. Many of Dembitzer's novels, especially his later ones, contain autobiographical elements, and a description of this flight across Europe is depicted in his book Visas for America. Many of his manuscripts were lost during this time. In August 1942 Dembitzer's younger brother Chaim Nussyn Dembitzer and his wife were killed by the Nazis, and his book Visas for America is dedicated to this sibling.

Salamon Dembitzer struggled until 1947 with his life as a recent immigrant in New York City. He was occasionally supported financially by his brother in New Zealand, a character sometimes mentioned in his novels. His life as an immigrant during this time is depicted in his fictional writings, especially in his unpublished manuscripts "Das Affidavit and Triebmanns Verwirrungen" and "The Chronic Fugitive."

In 1947 Dembitzer left New York for Australia. He lived in Sydney until 1958. In 1950 his novel Drama in Ostende, first written in 1939, was published by Villon Press. Visas for America was published in 1952, and in 1955 several of his short stories from the 1920s were published under the title Adventure in Prague. While living in Australia Salamon Dembitzer married Hertha Weiss, the owner of Villon Press.

Although Salamon Dembitzer never returned to Germany, he did come back to Europe. In 1958 he moved to Lugano, Switzerland. He died there on October 11, 1964.

Sources: Seelman-Eggebert, Ulrich, "Ein jüdisches Dichtershicksal," National-Zeitung Basel, Nr. 443, 27 September 1970.