Sachs, Nelly, << zahks, NEHL ee >> (1891-1970), was a German-born Jewish poet and dramatist. She shared the 1966 Nobel Prize in literature with the Israeli writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon. The Nobel judges honored Sachs’s “outstanding lyrical and dramatic writing, which interprets Israel’s destiny with touching strength.” Most of her poetry deals with persecution and agonies endured by the Jewish people for hundreds of years.
Sachs was born on Dec. 10, 1891, and educated in Berlin. Her first published work was Legends and Tales (1921), a collection of short stories. In 1940, during World War II, she fled to Sweden to avoid persecution of Jews by the Nazis in Germany. After World War II, Sachs wrote poetry about the Holocaust—the mass murder of European Jews and others by the Nazis. Sachs wrote in German. English translations of many of her poems are contained in O the Chimneys (1967) and The Seeker and Other Poems (1970). Her best-known play is Eli: A Mystery Play of the Sufferings of Israel (1950). She died on May 12, 1970.
