At that time he also wrote his first book, in Yiddish, Gedankn un motivn - lider in proze ("Ideas and Motifs - Prose Poems"), published in Vilna in 1907.

Here he had great difficulty earning a living, and decided to leave, as many other Russian intellectuals were doing, and moved to Berlin, Germany, where his son Joseph was born.

The work contained a complicated web of metaphors tied to Hasidic mysticism - especially on the Kabbalah and the symbolic stories of Nachman of Breslov - that can create a universe of images and parables, folk tales, children's poems and rhymes.

In 1929, he was criticized when the Russian Yiddish newspaper Di Royte Velt ("The Red World") reprinted his tale Unter a Ployt ("Bottom Fence").

The then president of the Russian Yiddish Writers Federation, Moyshe Litvakov, initiated a smear campaign at the end of which Der Nister had to renounce the literary symbolism.

Just before World War II, the Soviet government briefly adopted less censorious policies over writings considered to be promoting Zionism.

During World War II, Der Nister was evacuated to Tashkent, where he wrote stories about the horrors of the persecution of Jews in German-occupied Poland, which had been described to him by friends firsthand.

These collected stories were published in 1943 under the title Korbones ("Victims") in Moscow, where he had retired with his second wife Lena Singalowska, a former actress of the Yiddish theater in Kiev.

In April 1942, Stalin ordered the formation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee designed to influence international public opinion and organize political and material support for the Soviet fight against Nazi Germany, particularly from the West.

He traveled there on a special migrant train, together with a thousand Holocaust survivors, to evaluate the development of the self-governing Jewish settlement in this area.

The researchers set up an improvised memorial atop his unmarked grave consisting of a Star of David fashioned from barbed wire.

The work is a realistically written description of Jewish life in his native city Berdychiv at the end of the 19th century, with the three brothers as main actors: Moshe is a proud business man; Luzi is a skeptic mystic and benefactor who believes with brave defiance in the eternity of the Jewish people, probably a self-representation of Kahanovich; and Alter is a philanthropic altruist.

David Roskies calls the depiction of the protagonist, Moshe, "the most finely wrought portrait of a hasidic merchant in all of Yiddish literature.

The book describes Kahanovich's uneasy friendship with artist Marc Chagall, inside whose frames he hid some of his writings.