Yechiel Shraibman

Yechiel Shraibman (born March 12, 1913 in the Bessarabian shtetl Rashkov ; † December 9, 2005 in Chișinău / Moldova ) was a Yiddish author.

It belongs to the young tradition of modern Yiddish literature, which did not establish itself until the middle of the 19th century. His works are strongly autobiographical and read as a “multi-faceted literary self-portrait with highlights on contemporary history and Eastern European-Jewish cultural landscapes from different periods of the 20th century”.

Shraibman grew up in poor conditions. He enjoyed the traditional Jewish education, attended the Romanian elementary school and, after private lessons and self-study, completed an apprenticeship as a watchmaker. After doing odd jobs as a village teacher and weaver, he studied from 1930 at the Chernivtsi Hebrew Teachers' College. After he came into contact with revolutionary ideas there and was arrested and expelled from the seminary, he went into hiding in Bucharest. There he prompted in the Yiddish theater and began to write. He made his literary debut in 1936 in the New York newspaper "Ssignal" with a novella and a literary miniature. In 1940 he returned with his family to Kishinev, which had become Soviet, and in 1941 was one of the first Bessarabian authors to be accepted into the Soviet Writers' Union. He survived the Second World War as a farm worker in Uzbekistan.

The "black years", in which several Jewish authors and artists were liquidated under Stalin, became a formative, frightening life trauma for him. During this time he did not publish anything that led to his expulsion from the Writers' Union. This event triggered a serious life and creative crisis, which he was only able to overcome literarily in the early 1960s. From 1961 he published a large number of his works in the SU's only Yiddish literary journal - the “ Ssowetisch hejmland ” - and also worked for its editorial team. From 1994 until his death he acted as the organizer and chairman of the "Yidi Center" in Chişinău / Moldova.

Until 2003 he published several other stories, most of them in Moldovan and Russian. Some of his works have also been translated into Romanian, Armenian, French, Bashkir, Uzbek, Hebrew, and German. His work has received a wide variety of awards over the years.

Works

Selection according to year of publication under original title

• 1939 "Majne Hefte"
• 1946 "Draj sumers"
• 1973 "Yorn un reges"
• 1981 "In that sumer"
• 1984 "Wajter"
• 1997 "Schtendik"
• 2000 "Jezire un libe"
• 2003 “Sibn jor mit sibn chadoschim” (German translation in 2009 by be.bra Verlag under the title “Seven Years and Seven Months”)
• 2007 "Kleyns un groys, Kleyne noveln, miniaturn" (published posthumously by his widow Marina Shraibman)

Web links

• Literature by and about Yechiel Shraibman in the catalog of the German National Library