Melech Ravitch (1893–1976) was a poet, essayist, playwright, editor, educator, and cultural activist. During the 1920s, he played a leading role in the avant-garde literary movement Di khalyastre (The Gang), serving as the editor of the movement’s journal, Di vog (The Scales). From 1924 to 1934, he was executive secretary of the Fareyn fun yidishe literatn un zhurnalistn in varshe (Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists in Warsaw). He helped found Literarishe bleter (Literary Pages), the main Yiddish literary journal in interwar Poland. Ravitch lived for extended periods in Australia, Argentina, New York, and Mexico before settling in Montreal in 1941, where he worked at the Jewish Public Library, co-founding and for several years directing the library’s Yidishe folks universitet (Jewish Public University).

Ravitch’s autobiography, Dos mayse bukh fun mayn lebn (The Storybook of My Life), comprises three volumes, each containing numerous short chapters that can be read independently. The chapter translated here, “Prehistoric Landscapes” (referring to the title of one of Ravitch’s poetry collections), is drawn from the second volume, which covers Ravitch’s life from 1908 to 1921. In this volume Ravitch writes about his early development as a Yiddish writer, his service in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I, his older brother’s suicide, and his experience with tuberculosis, which he contracted while serving in the military. The illness remained dormant until 1919, when he came close to dying, an experience he describes in one of the earlier chapters of his autobiography.

Ravitch dedicated the poems in the collection Prehistorishe landshaftn (Prehistoric Landscapes) to his older brother, Moyshe Bergner-Harari (1892–1921), whom he describes as “a person who had neither delegated the poet to speak in his name nor given him permission to do so.”