Charlotte Simmonds
Fischel Schneersohn was born around 1885/88 in Kamianets Podolski under the Russian Empire. He studied medicine in Berlin from 1908. By 1920 he was in Kiev, working as a children’s doctor and co-editing the short-lived Hebrew literary journal Kadima. He then returned to Berlin to direct a Jewish children’s centre. He is variously recorded as having specialised in psychiatry and psychology; the non-fiction books and articles he published in both Yiddish and German certainly belong more to the field of psychology than psychiatry. But he was also interested in non-scientific literature, with many of his Yiddish novels published in the 1920s and 30s, also in German and Hebrew translation.
In the 1930s he emigrated to Mandate Palestine where he continued to practise either child psychiatry or psychology, running a clinic and afterschool programme in Tel Aviv for neurotic children. In 1952, he wrote a lengthy German report on a syndrome which could not be considered today to have any nosological validity. It was a type of Lesesucht, or reading addiction, observed among the children in his Tel Aviv clinic over 1937 to 1951.