Yechiel Hofer (1906-1972) was born in Warsaw to a Hasidic family, and was a close childhood friend of A.J. Heschel. He trained as a medical doctor, but devoted himself to writing stories, poetry and essays – first in Polish, and then in Yiddish. He was exiled to Siberia during World War II, and emigrated to Israel in 1951. Yitzhok Yanasovitsh praised Hofer’s 'abundance of descriptions of ways of life and…wealth of types and images which populated the Jewish street in Warsaw in the past'. Melech Ravitch described him as an 'exceptionally vivid author of novels, whose background was the Warsaw courtyard'. Hofer received the Itsik Manger Prize for outstanding contributions to Yiddish literature in 1971, the year before his death in Yafo, Israel.