Meir Blinken

Blinken was born in 1879 in Pereiaslav (Ukrainian: Перея́слав, translit. Pereyáslav).[1] There he studied at a religious Jewish primary school, followed by a business education in Kyiv.[1]

After starting a family,[1] Blinken moved to the United States at age 25 in 1904.[2] Over the next 10 years, while making a living in jobs that included carpentry and owning a massage business,[1] Blinken published about 50 fiction and nonfiction works.[2] In 1908, Blinken published the book Weiber, which is one of the earliest Yiddish books to explicitly engage with women's sexuality, and perhaps the first book by a Yiddish writer in America to engage with sexuality at all.[1] Richard Elman commented on these themes in a review of Blinken's work in the 1980s, writing in The New York Times that in the community of Yiddish authors who wrote for the largely female literary audience of Yiddish fiction, Blinken "was one of the few who chose to show with empathy the woman's point of view in the act of love or sin".[3] The scholar of Yiddish literature Ruth Wisse wrote that Blinken was highly popular among his own generation of Yiddish-speaking Americans but that his reputation quickly diminished in the years after his death.[2] Emanuel S. Goldsmith characterized Blinken as part of a generation of Yiddish writers in America who developed a new form of Yiddish literature, and both Goldsmith and Elman emphasized that the major legacy of Blinken's work was that it vividly evoked the atmosphere and characters of the very early Jewish diaspora in New York.[4]

Blinken died in 1915, at the age of 37.[5] Two of Blinken's grandsons, Alan Blinken and Donald Blinken, served as U.S. ambassador to Belgium and Hungary, respectively. Meir Blinken is the great-grandfather of U.S. President Joseph Biden's appointed U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken.[6]

Some of Blinken's collected works were published by the State University of New York Press in 1984,[7] and have been included in other compendiums of Yiddish literature in the century after his death.[8]