TUVYE-BOREKH (THOMAS B.) EYGES

TUVYE-BOREKH (THOMAS B.) EYGES (March 15, 1875-1960)

Born in Vilna.  His father was the head bookkeeper for Menashe Heyman’s bank in Vilna, and in 1880 he left for Moscow.  For nine years he studied privately with a rabbi, later graduating from the sixth class of Aleksander’s Artisanal School.  At age sixteen he was in a secular high school, but one year later he was barred from it due to severe anti-Jewish laws.  He then moved to London where he worked in a shoe factory and was secretary of the Jewish “Boot and Shoe Union.”  Two years later he became a member of the group, “Arbayter fraynd” (Workers’ friend).  He began to write articles in Arbayter fraynd, and he contributed to supporting the radical Hagode shel peysekh (Haggadah of Passover).  He came to the United States at the end of 1900 and settled in Boston.  For a period of three years, he traveled around the country, buying books and giving lectures.  He ran a weekly column in Fraye arbiter shtime (Free voice of labor) under the name “Correspondences from a traveler” which he signed “tet-alef” [Tuvye Eyges].  In the Boston edition of Forverts (Forward), he published a series entitled “Interesting corners of Boston,” and in the Boston Der yidisher firer (The Jewish leader) he wrote fifteen articles entitled “The history of New England.”  He translated from Russian into English the four-act drama by Stepniak entitled “The New Convert” which was published by The Stratford Co., Boston (1917), with a foreword about Stepniak and P. Kropotkin.