Solomon Ettinger

[2] At the age of 15, Solomon Ettinger entered into an arranged marriage with Golda, the daughter of magnate Judah Leib Wolf, of Zamość.

Eventually, he traveled to the big town of the Austrian partition, the primarily Polish-Ukrainian city of Lviv (then often known as Lemberg), to study medicine at its renowned University.

His only surviving dramas are fragments of two plays Der Feter fun America (The Uncle from America) and Freleche Yungeleut (Carefree Youth) found after his death, and the play that keeps his name alive and is still performed by Yiddish theaters around the world, Serkele, which, while written when Ettinger was in his twenties, and performed during his lifetime, was first published posthumously in 1861.

Serkele is one of the most renowned plays in the entire repertoire of the Yiddish theater and owes its high reputation to its strong sense of form, sound and rhythm.

Renowned Yiddish playwrights who flourished immediately after Ettinger, such as Abraham Goldfaden and Jacob Gordin have written how much they were influenced by Serkele.