(1888–1943), novelist. Yoshue Perle was born in Radom (central Poland); his father was a merchant. After several years of traditional Jewish education, Perle was sent to a Russian school and became a bookkeeper. At age 17, he made his way to Warsaw, where he worked in a bank. His free time was spent in reading literature, visiting the theater, and meeting with other young Jewish writers. His first work in Yiddish, an article titled “Shabes,” was published in 1908.
As a result of his occupation, Perle became acquainted with well-to-do Polish-speaking Jews, whose aim was to gain access to Polish society. Perle was the first, and remained one of the few, Yiddish writers who described these assimilated Polish Jews in his writing, mainly in his collection of stories Nayn a zeyger in der fri (Nine O’Clock in the Morning; 1930). His greatest achievement was a trilogy dealing with Jewish life in Poland in the first decades of the twentieth century: Yidn fun a gants yor (Everyday Jews; 1937), Di gildene pave (The Golden Peacock; 1937), and Gilgulim (Transformations [Metamorphoses]; 1939). He published other novels serially in the daily press, and also wrote short stories, literary reportages, and journalism. However, in the late 1920s, he published several shund (trash) novels as serials in Der moment, signed with his characteristic trademark of three typographical stars. He was severely criticized for these works. Nevertheless, in 1937 and 1938, he was awarded two prestigious prizes, one by the Warsaw Yiddish PEN club and the other by the Bund.
Though Perle was not politically committed, he was very concerned about the growing persecution of Polish Jewry in the late 1930s. In March 1936, he wrote to a friend: “It’s bad and bitter here. When they slaughter us all, there won’t be anywhere to bury us.” In September 1939, Perle joined tens of thousands of people fleeing Warsaw. He reached Lwów in November 1939, where Soviet authorities placed obstacles on the distribution of his literary works because of his political “untrustworthiness.”
When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, Perle, his son, and his daughter-in-law returned to Warsaw. There he was involved in the Yiddish underground cultural organization, Yizkor. He lived in relative comfort until the major deportations of July–September 1942, which he survived. Perle described those days in a detailed diary, titled Khurbn Varshe (Destruction of Warsaw), in which he condemns the Jewish leadership in the ghetto, especially the Jewish police, along with the Germans. Perle also survived the January 1943 deportations. In March 1943, he and his son escaped the ghetto and lived on the Aryan side of Warsaw under false identities. Following the Warsaw ghetto uprising in April 1943, Perle and his son were lured out of hiding (with a false offer of foreign citizenship certificates that would allow them to leave the country, known as the Hotel Polski affair) and were sent to their deaths in Auschwitz.
• Rachel Auerbach (Rokhl Oyerbakh), “Tseshotene perl,” Di goldene keyt 79–80 (1973): 141–232; Natan Cohen, Sefer, sofer ve-‘iton: Merkaz ha-tarbut ha-Yehudit be-Varshah, 1918–1942 (Jerusalem, 2003); David Roskies, The Literature of Jewish Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe (Philadelphia, 1988); Micheline Weinstock and Nathan Weinstock, “Yehoshua Perle, chroniqueur du désastre,” Revue d’histoire de la Shoah 164 (1988): 106–168.