Maurice Samuel

Maurice Samuel (February 8, 1895 – May 4, 1972) was a Romanian-born British and American novelist, translator and lecturer of Jewish heritage. He was a prominent Jewish Humanist and Zionist intellectual. His best-known and most commercially successful work was The World of Sholom Aleichem (1943), and for which he was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The non-fiction book deals with Jewish life in Russia in the nineteenth century.

In 1956, he was awarded the 1955 Stephen Wise Award of the American Jewish Congress for his “significant contributions over three decades” to Jewish education and culture."

In 1964, Robert Alter wrote of his profile in Commentary: "For more than three decades, Maurice Samuel has been a kind of one-man educational movement in American Jewish life. Anyone with even a passing interest in the East European Jewish milieu, Yiddish and Hebrew literature, Zionism, the future of American Jewry, the nature of anti-Semitism, the role of Judaism in the West, is likely to have read at least one of Samuel’s books."

In 1967, he was awarded the B’nai B’rith Jewish Heritage Award, a literary prize given annually to a writer who “makes a positive contribution to contemporary literature by his authentic interpretation of Jewish life and values."

Samuel received the Itzik Manger Prize for Yiddish literature posthumously in 1972.