Yiddishkayt | soviet union

1/30 | Birthday of Isaak Dunayevsky

Today in Yiddishkayt… January 30 Birthday of Isaak Dunayevsky, Composer The popular Soviet composer Isaak Dunayevsky was born January 30, 1900 in the shtetl of Lokhvitza (today Лохвиця, Ukraine) not far from the provincial capital of Poltava. He entered the Kharkov Musical Conservatory in 1910 and had a rigorous classical training, studying violin under Josef Achron (who was interested in fusing Jewish musical elements into his compositions), and took musical theory with the musicologist and composer Semyon Bogatyrev. After graduating, he worked as a violinist and conductor...

Today in Yiddishkayt… January 23 Birthday of Sergei Eisenstein, film director Sergei Eizenshtein was born to a middle-class family in Riga, Latvia. His father was of German-Jewish and Swedish descent and his mother was from a Russian Orthodox family. Sergei studied architecture and engineering at the Petrograd Institute of Civil Engineering. In 1918 he joined the Red Army and began studying Japanese. He later cited his knowledge of Japanese and exposure to Kabuki theater as a major influence on his artistic development. In 1920, Eisenstein moved to Moscow, and began his career in...

Today in Yiddishkayt… January 26 Birthday of Ben Adir (Avrom Rosin), Radical Philosopher Avrom Rosin, who published under the pseudonym Ben-Adir, was born on January 26, 1878 in Krutcha (today, Круча, Belarus), in the Russian Empire. Rosin was a leading figure first in the Jewish Socialist Workers Party, later in the United Jewish Socialist Workers Party, and ultimately in the territorialist grouping known as the פֿרײַלאַנד-ליגע (Freeland League). He affiliated with illegal socialist circles in Minsk in the mid-1890s and studied in Paris at the beginning of the...

Today in Yiddishkayt… January 12 Yortsayt of Shloyme Mikhoels, Actor On the night of January 12, 1948 the great star of the Yiddish stage, Sholyme Mikhoels was murdered outside of Minsk. Born Shloyme Vovsi in Dvinsk (now Daugavpils, Latvia) in 1890 , the future Shloyme (or Solomon) Mikhoels went to school in Riga and attended the law faculty in Petrograd before becoming the lead actor in Aleksandr Granovskii’s Jewish chamber theater, which later became GOSET, the Moscow State Yiddish Theater. Mikhoels performed a wide variety of roles—from the comic to the tragic—although his...

Today in Yiddishkayt… January 7 Birthday of Aron Kushnirov, Yiddish Poet The Yiddish poet Aron Kushnirov was born Aron Kushnirovitsh just south of Kiev in Boyarka, Ukraine (Боярка, made famous by Sholem Aleichem as Boyberik) on January 7, 1890. He received a traditional Jewish education in kheyder, but after his father’s death when Kushnirov was 13, he went off to Kiev to become work as an assistant in a grocery and continued his education on his own. He was conscripted into the Tsarist army in the First World War and continued fighting in the Red Army after 1920. His first...