Yiddishkayt | soviet yiddish

3/20 | Birthday of Moyshe Kulbak

Today in Yiddishkayt… March 20 Birthday of Moyshe Kulbak, Poet Moyshe Kulbak was born in Smorgon (today Смаргонь, Belarus), Vilna Province of the Russian Empire on March 20, 1896. The small town had a legendary status among the Jews of the area. The Radziwill family, which historically controlled the region, had set up a circus bear training academy in the town and created thriving leather and tanning industry as well as a tar manufacturing concern. The surreal mix of circus bears and local laborers making their living from the land would eventually be immortalized in Kulbak’s...

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...

Today in Yiddishkayt… January 4 Birthday of M. Daniel, Soviet Yiddish Author & Playwright The popular Soviet Yiddish writer M. Daniel was born Daniel-Mordkhe, later Mark, Meyerovitsh on January 4, 1897 in Dvinsk (today, Daugavpils, Latvia). Daniel made his literary debut with his short story, “אין אַ צײַט אַזאַ [In Such a Time]” in 1924. He wrote for the literary journal דער שטראָם [The Current] and published his first volume of stories a few years later, before the publication of his most important work יוליס [Yulis], which he later adapted...