David Vogel was born in the town of
Sataniv in the Podolia region in the Russian Pale of Settlement. The family spoke Yiddish. In 1909–1910, he arrived in
Vilnius as a yeshiva student. He worked as the caretaker of a synagogue and studied Hebrew. Moving to
Vienna in 1912, he spent his time sitting in cafes and teaching Hebrew to make ends meet. He accepted a job copying letters for the Zionist federation but soon quit. During
World War I he was arrested as a Russian enemy alien and spent time in internment camps. Towards the end of the war, he began publishing impressionist poems. In 1919, he married Ilka, who became ill with
tuberculosis. In 1925, he settled in Paris, where he wrote prose and poetry. In 1929, he and his second wife, Ada Nadler,
immigrated to Palestine, where their daughter, Tamara, was born. After spending time in Poland and Berlin, the family returned to Paris. When World War II erupted, Vogel and his daughter fled to southeastern France where Ada was recuperating in a sanatorium. He was interned as an Austrian citizen and freed in 1940 when the Nazis occupied France. Various stories circulated about his life after that. In 1944–45, the Hebrew newspapers in Palestine reported his "disappearance." He was presumed to have died in the
Holocaust.Israeli literary scholar
Dan Pagis discovered that he returned to
Hauteville after his release from internment camp. In 1944, he was arrested by the Gestapo, imprisoned in Lyon, and sent to Drancy, a transit camp for French Jews. Four days later, he was murdered in
Auschwitz. ==Literary career==