Avraham Karpinowitz — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

 Abraham Karpinowitz was born in 1913 in Vilna, which was then part of Poland. His father, Moshe Karpinowitz (1892-1941) was the director of one of the Yiddish theaters in Vilna (the whole family perished during the Holocaust). As a child, he went to a Yiddish-speaking school. He managed to escape to Kazakhstan in 1941 when the German invasion took place. After the war he returned to Vilna and in 1947, boarded the "Theodore Herzl", a ship of illegal immigrants that was captured by the British. All those on board were sent to a detention camp in Cyprus.  While there, he became active in social and literary circles and, in 1949, he made aliyah.  He worked for 30 years in the administration offices of the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra.

He studied history at the University of London and wrote literary works and monographs in Yiddish; he published articles in the Yiddish press about political issues and the future of the Yiddish language and culture. In 1951 he joined the Yiddish literary group called Yung Israel and, in 1959 he published his first novel Der Weg Ken Sodom (The Road to Sodom).

In 1976 he was awarded the Mendele Mocher Sfarim prize for Yiddish writers; in 1988 he was awarded the Prime Minister's prize for Yiddish literature. An anthology of twelve of his stories from Vilna entitled Sipurei Vilna was published in Hebrew. The only book he wrote in Hebrew was the monograph of Bronislaw Huberman, the founder of the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra.

Karpinowitz passed away in 2004.

From: Wikipedia