ALEKSANDR BRAKHMAN

ALEKSANDR BRAKHMAN (1897-1942)

He was a Soviet historian and current events author, born in Homel (Gomel), Byelorussia.  From his early youth, he was involved in the revolutionary movement. In the early 1920s, he stood at the head in his hometown of the propaganda division of the regional committee of the Communist Party, and later he came to Moscow to study. In the second half of the 1920s, he was a student in the Jewish section of the Communist University of National Minorities of the West (the “Mayrevke”) named for Julian Marchlewski.  He was the editor of Mayrevnik, a journal of the Jewish section of the university in Moscow in 1927 (together with E. Felkovitsh and others).  After graduating, he became a teacher at that institution, and until 1936, when the university was closed down, he presided over the Jewish section. In 1928 he became a member of the Moscow presidium of the All-Russian Society for the Study of the Yiddish Language, Literature, and History.  Over the course of many years, he engaged in variegated scholarly and propagandistic work. He evinced deep interest in historical issues as well as linguistic and literary research even during his earlier time in Homel. In Moscow this became his principal activity, and he devoted considerable attention to research work in the fields of Jewish and general history, sociology, historiography, and philosophy. In the 1930s, he published a large number of articles on the Jewish question, especially issues of Yiddish and Yiddish literature, using the pseudonym Ambrakh, and he actively participated in scholarship and politics, disputations, and discussions. There is no detailed information on his life and activities after the 1936 closing of the Mayrevke and the subsequent purging of its leaders. It is known that his last work, “Tsu der metodologye fun der alt-yidisher geshikhte” (On the methodology of ancient Jewish history), appeared in the Minsk journal Shtern (Star) in 1940. According to certain pieces of information, he died at the front in 1942.

He published writings in Forpost (Outpost) and Visnshaft un revolutsye (Science and revolution), among other works concerned with a solution of the Jewish problem in Soviet Russia and Birobidzhan.  Among his books: Ekonomishe geografye, khrestomatye (Economic geography, reader), co-authored with Y. Zhiv (Moscow: Central People’s Publ., 1928), 258 pp.; Klasnkamf khrestomatye, tsu der geshikhte fun klasnkamf un fun der revolutsyonerer bavegung in rusland (Class struggle reader, on the history of class struggle and the revolutionary movement in Russia), co-authored with G. Tomsinski and Sh. Palatnik (Moscow: Shul un bukh, 1928), 320 pp.; Yidn in f.s.s.r., atlas fun kartogramen un diagramen (Jews in Soviet Russia, atlas of maps and diagrams), compiled by a group of students in the Jewish section of the Communist University of National Minorities of the West, under the editorship of Brakhman and Y. Zhiv, with a foreword by M. Frumkina (Moscow: Central People’s Publ., 1930), 134 pp.

Sources: “A yor arbet fun der gezelshaft tsu shtudirn di yidishe shprakh, literatur un geshikhte” (A year’s work of the Society’s study of the Yiddish language, literature and history), Tsaytshrift 2-3 (Minsk, 1928); “Oykh in unzer shul iz nit in gantsn glat” (Not at all even in our school either), Der shtern (Kharkov) (April 14, 1934); “Biblyografye tsu der shprakh-baratung” (Bibliography of the language conference), Afn shprakhfront 3-4 (Kiev) (1935), p. 293.

[Additional information from: Berl Kagan, comp., Leksikon fun yidish-shraybers (Biographical dictionary of Yiddish writers) (New York, 1986), col. 115; and 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. 57.]