Leon Talmi

Leon Talmi ( Russian Тальми, Леон Яковлевич ; born 1893 in Lachowicze ; executed on August 12, 1952 in Moscow ) was a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFK) .

Life

Leon Talmi was born in 1893 as Lejser Talminowiecki in the shtetl Lachowicze in what is now Belarus . His father died early and his mother had to raise him and his brother Isaac alone. The brothers emigrated to the USA in 1912.

In July 1917 Leon returned to Petrograd to take part in the revolutionary events. He became a member of the United Socialist Jewish Workers' Party - Varejnikte . The party sent him to Kiev , where he edited the Yiddish party newspaper Neie zeit and wrote a large number of articles. When the General Jewish Workers' Union (Bund) split under pressure from the communists, Talmi joined the Bolshevik- oriented Kombund .

In 1921 the Comintern sent him to the USA, where he was supposed to carry out propaganda among the Jewish workers and intellectuals. There he worked on several magazines and supported organizations close to the Soviet Union .

In 1929 he and Ilya Watenberg accompanied a delegation of American agricultural experts to the Soviet Union and also to the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan . Talmi also wrote a book about it, which was published by the Communist Party of the USA (CPS) .

In 1934 he returned to the Soviet Union, where he became chief editor of the state publishing house for foreign language literature.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union , despite his 48 years of age, he volunteered for the army, but was seconded to the Soviet information office. There he was commissioned by Solomon Losowski to organize a translation agency for English-language war propaganda.

Talmi had worked for the JAFK since 1942. Until then, he had not been particularly interested in Yiddish literature or Jewish affairs. He viewed work at JAFK as only a temporary assignment.

He was arrested on July 3, 1949 (six months later than the other defendants of the JAFK). His arrest served, as with other defendants who had temporarily lived in the USA, to portray the JAFK as an anti-Soviet American espionage organization.

Leon Talmi was shot together with other members of the JAFK on August 12, 1952.

literature

• Arno Lustiger : Rotbuch: Stalin and the Jews. The tragic story of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the Soviet Jews. Structure, Berlin 1998, 2nd edition 2002, ISBN 3-7466-8049-2 , p. 410 ff.