Who was Mani Leyb?
Mani Leyb (or Leib) was a poet and shoemaker. He was born Mani Leyb Brahinsky in 1883 in Nizhyn, a tiny Jewish town not far from Kiev in the Ukraine. His family was poor and there were eight children. His father sold furs, hides, and animals at the regional fairs, and Mani always remembered the fascinating stories he overheard as a child between his father and the other horse and cow traders, the stories and speech of ordinary people. His mother, the family’s primary bread-winner, sold hens, geese and eggs in the town market. In “A mayse vegn zikh” (A Story About Myself), he wrote that she was a fount of spontaneous rhymes, poems, and epigrams. At the age of 11 Leyb left school to be apprenticed to a bootmaker. He almost immediately was writing poems. Leyb was a social activist and, involved in strikes and revolutionary activities, he was arrested twice while still in his teens. He emigrated to the United States at the age of 22 and settled in New York in 1906. He decided to stop using
