By the middle of 1939, 19-year-old Shmuel "Sam" Batt had already completed a 260-page historical novel, in Hebrew, on the Spanish Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, which he planned to translate into Polish before submitting it for publication. Teachers at Batt's "Tarbut" school in his native Shumsk, Poland, had earlier predicted that Batt would become a Jewish writer based on both his poetry, inspired by the Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, as well as his prose. Batt's teachers could not have foreseen how events of the next few years would alter the path of the budding Hebrew writer.

In September 1939 the Nazis invaded Poland, and two weeks later the Soviet Union occupied and annexed the eastern part of the country, making Batt a resident of the USSR, which banned Hebrew as a Zionist language. Due to the dangers of writing in Hebrew, Batt began to write in Ukrainian for local papers, while simultaneously beginning a work of fiction in his mother tongue -- Yiddish.

Though Batt's Hebrew was and remains remarkably proficient for a man raised in Poland, it was in Yiddish that he reached his literary potential. His resulting novel, "In Klem" (In the Fix), which reached 893 handwritten pages, was finished in the spring of 1941 and might have become a classic of Yiddish literature. Conceived as the first in a trilogy, the book traced the evolution of a Jewish tribe which moved from a defeated Judea through Rome, and then to the Jewish kingdom of the Khazars, before settling in Eastern Poland (now Ukraine).

But in June 1941, Batt was forced to flee deeper into the Soviet Union to avoid the advancing German Army, and left his manuscript with his fiancée for safekeeping. When he returned home in 1946 as a member of the victorious Red Army, he found that the young woman, as well as his entire family in Poland, had been exterminated by the Nazis. "Everything I had was incinerated," he says in a soft Yiddish-accented voice, "I didn't even have my manuscript."

Emotionally incapable of either rewriting his novel or penning any new Yiddish works in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Batt took the opportunity as a veteran of the war to enroll in the law school at Lvov University in the Ukraine. Though he did not know it at that time, the career change might have saved his life. After receiving his law degree, Batt took a job as an attorney, defending, among others, Ukrainian nationalists accused of plotting and waging a clandestine war against the Soviet government.

The cases were mostly losers, and those convicted were usually sent to Siberia where they often did not survive. Batt defended them to the best of his ability, and in order to defend the accused at the tribunals run by the feared Soviet security service -- the NKVD (later to become the KGB) -- he was required to join the Communist Party.

It was this devotion to his law practice which probably saved Batt's life. In 1952, a paranoid Joseph Stalin ordered the execution of 24 Yiddish writers following a clandestine trial in the Lubianka prison on trumped up charges that they were enemies of the Soviet government. Their murders effectively deprived Soviet Jewry of its cultural elite. Though very few Yiddish writers survived the purge, Batt was among them.

"They didn't know I was a Yiddish writer," Batt says with a wry smile. "Publicly I wrote in Ukrainian. But at home I wrote stories in Yiddish, and nobody knew about them; even my family. In my heart I considered myself first and foremost a Yiddish writer."

Batt's Yiddish self would stay hidden until 1957 when he was able to move back with his family to his native Poland, where the atmosphere for the Jews was a little more open. That year Batt became a regional editor of the Folks Sztyme, the only Yiddish daily then operating in Poland. While working for the paper, he wrote approximately eight articles, stories and essays a month, many of which were reprinted in Yiddish newspapers in New York, Paris and Buenos Aires. At the same time, Batt continued to practice law.

Sam Batt as a young man in 1944 .

Though he had returned to Yiddish writing, Batt did not avoid controversy. In a 1957 editorial, well publicized in the world Yiddish press, Batt, in contrast to most writers of the era, criticized the Israeli government for not reaching a settlement with the Arab world. "Everything I said about the Arab-Israeli conflict at that time is being said by Israeli leaders today. What Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak is doing today, I called for 40 years ago." But if Batt's views are shared by many Israelis today, his comments were not taken lightly by Israel or the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

In 1969, due to the anti-Semitic actions of Poland's Gomulka government, as well as a desire to see an older brother living in America (whom he had not seen for 50 years) Batt decided to emigrate to the United States. But Batt and his wife Regina couldn't easily get visas because of Batt's dovish political views, and even during Batt's interview at the U.S. consulate in Italy, the consular officer questioned him about his opposition to Israeli policy. The officer, a Richard Nixon appointee, asked Batt why he was critical of Israel policy.

"Don't I have the right to criticize political views I don't agree with?" replied an irritated Batt. "Don't you have Democrats and Republicans in the United States? Don't they criticize each other, or is only one view acceptable in America?"

The Batts received visas and, after some years in Rochester, New York, moved to the Los Angeles area where Batt became a prominent figure in Yiddish circles. He now heads the Yiddish Culture Club in West Hollywood

Batt, whose apartment is filled with literature in six languages, has, in addition to his lost novels, created an extensive body of work in Yiddish. These include two collections of short stories, two novels and a screenplay. The first novel, "My Private Wars," is a largely autobiographical account of Batt's own life in prewar Poland, including his efforts to escape poverty and receive an education, and his life under the Soviets after they occupied Eastern Poland. The book also details Batt's struggle as an attorney against the Soviet legal bureaucracy and his efforts to achieve freedom for himself and others.

The second novel, "Images," chronicles the early history of a Jewish family from the first centuries of the common era, to their destruction by the Nazis during World War II, and revisits some of the themes discussed in Batt's lost "In Klem." Batt's screenplay, "For the People's Honor," a dramatization of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, was first written in English in 1983 and translated into Yiddish by Batt just this year.

The fiction of Batt is most certainly influenced by the Holocaust, but it draws heavily from Yiddish-Polish folk tradition and transports one back to an era when it appeared that humanity was on the verge of some great social progress.

A 1996 translation of a collection of his short stories, "Oif Eibig" (For Eternity), offers a fine introduction to Batt's work and an insight into Jewish life in Poland on the eve of World War II. Rather than a romanticized view of Eastern European shtetl of the past, Batt's work also shows Yiddish literature as it might have been if Yiddish had survived as a language of the masses.

Batt's story lines are both tight and dramatic, and his prose is often reminiscent of the writing of such acclaimed Holocaust writers as Eli Wiesel and Aharon Appelfeld. Unlike Wiesel who writes in French and Appelfeld who is a Hebrew writer, Batt writes in Yiddish and his circle of potential readers is growing smaller as the older generation of native Yiddish speakers dies out.

"When I started to write," he notes, "the circle of readers was wide; there were a lot of readers. Now, there is no Yiddish daily paper in the United States."

Batt is confident that the Yiddish culture and language will revive itself due to the richness of its literature and writers. "It was the greatest culture," he notes, and "I am confident that 100 years from now there will be millions of Yiddish speakers and readers. The language and culture of Sholem Aleichem and other great Yiddish creators will never die," he vows.

To this end, Batt, the Yiddish writer, is doing his part. His second collection of short stories, "Trifles, Visions and More" was published at the beginning of December, and Batt works every day to complete yet another novel. He also has plans for two additional books in Yiddish; one about his visits to Israel, Indonesia and Egypt; the other about the Jewish themes in European classical music.

On December 5, Batt celebrated his 80th birthday with a party attended by 100 friends and admirers, including Yiddish poets and English writers. What present is Batt still hoping to receive? A copy of Microsoft Word in Yiddish, of course.