David Pinski (Yiddish: דוד פּינסקי; April 5, 1872 – August 11, 1959) was a Yiddish language writer, probably best known as a playwright. At a time when Eastern Europe was only beginning to experience the industrial revolution, Pinski was the first to introduce to its stage a drama about urban Jewish workers; a dramatist of ideas, he was notable also for writing about human sexuality with a frankness previously unknown to Yiddish literature. He was also notable among early Yiddish playwrights in having stronger connections to German language literary traditions than Russian. Early life He was born in Mogilev, in the Russian Empire (present-day Belarus), and was raised in nearby Vitebsk. At first destined for a career as a rabbi, he had achieved an advanced level in Talmudic studies by the age of 10. At 19 he left home, originally intending to study medicine in Vienna, Austria, but a visit to I.L. Peretz in Warsaw (then also under Russian control, now the capital of Poland) convinced him to pursue a literary career instead. He briefly began studies in Vienna (where he also wrote his first significant short story, "Der Groisser Menshenfreint"—"The Great Philanthropist"), but soon returned to Warsaw, where he established a strong reputation as a writer and as an advocate of Labor Zionism, before moving to Berlin, Germany in 1896 and to New York City in 1899. He pursued a doctorate at Columbia University; however, in 1904, having just completed his play Family Tsvi on the day set for his Ph.D. examination, he failed to show up for the exam, and never finished the degree. Works His naturalistic tragedy Isaac Sheftel (1899) tells of a technically creative weaver, whose employer scorns him, but exploits his inventions. He finally smashes the machines he has created, and falls into drunken self-destruction. Like many of Pinski's central characters, he is something other than a traditional hero or even a traditional tragic hero. His dark comedy Der Oytser (The Treasure), written in Yiddish 1902-1906 but first staged in German, by Max Reinhardt in Berlin in 1910, tells of a sequence of events in which the people of a town dig up and desecrate their own graveyard because they have come to believe there is a treasure buried somewhere in it. Rich and poor, secular and religious, all participate in the frenzy; a supernatural climax involves the souls of the dead, annoyed by the