KHAYEM [YEFIM] ORLYUK (ORLIUK)

KHAYEM [YEFIM] ORLYUK (ORLIUK) (1901-1938)

A writer on politics and a translator, he was born in Vilna, Lithuania.  He was a member of a Zionist youth organization.  He studied in Berlin and there became a Communist.  In 1929 he came to Soviet Russia.  In 1934 he became a special correspondent and a contributor to Der emes (The truth) in Moscow.  He translated into Yiddish several short books for children by the Russian author Korney Chukovsky.  He wrote under the names: Y. Orlyuk, Kh. Orlyuk, and Ye. Arlyuk.  He was arrested in 1937 and shot with a number of writers for Der emes, including Moyshe Litvakov.  Two of his translations of Chukuvsky’s booklets: Fligele migele (“The chattering fly”), “freely translated” (Moscow, 1935), 16 pp.; and Telefon (Telephone) (Moscow, 1937).

Sources: Emes (Moscow) (July 9, 1935), as well as in issues dated August 23 and 26, and September 14, 1935.

[Additional information from: Chaim Beider, Leksikon fun yidishe shrayber in ratn-farband (Biographical dictionary of Yiddish writers in the Soviet Union), ed. Boris Sandler and Gennady Estraikh (New York: Congress for Jewish Culture, Inc., 2011), p. 31.]