ABSTRACT
Dr. Joseph Isaac Bluestone was born in Kalwarja, Lithuania, in 1860. He received the customary Talmudic and Haskalah training and at the age of twenty he came to the United States. He studied medicine and practiced for many years on the lower East Side, numbering among his friends many of the Hebraists and the Jewish intelligentsia of the Russian-Polish migration period. Despite his participation in many communal activities, particularly in the Zionist movement, and his professional practice, he found time to write Hebrew poetry in the old Haskalah style. Many of these poems he published in Tel Aviv in 1931 under the title, Shirim Umeshalim.
