SHOLEM GORDON

SHOLEM GORDON (1890-August 1963)

            He was a literary critic who wrote articles for the first Soviet Yiddish anthologies: Eygns (One’s own), Shtrom (Tide), Nayerd (New land), and Oktyabr (October).  Biographical information about him remains largely unknown. He was accused of writing “formalistic and impressionistic criticism” in the Moscow journal Shtrom 1 (1922) on questions of literature and art. He served as a literary consultant on Yiddish literature for the Great Soviet Encyclopedia in the 1950s. For the “Short Literary Encyclopedia” in Russian (Moscow), he wrote articles on the writers: Dovid Bergelson, Chaim Nachman Bialik, and others.

Sources: A. Gutman, in Tsaytshrift (Minsk) 2-3 (1928); Y. Bronshteyn, in Atake (Moscow-Kharkov-Minsk) (1931), pp. 47, 48; Prolit (Karkov) (March-April 1930), p. 114; Y. Lifshits and M. Altshuler, comps., Briv fun yidishe sovetishe shraybers (Letters of Soviet Jewish writers) (Jerusalem, 1979/1980).

[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), pp. 73-74.]