TEVYE GEN

TEVYE GEN (May 5, 1912-2003)

            He was a Soviet Yiddish prose writer, born in the town of Šeduva (Shadov), Lithuania.  During WWI his family moved to Mariupol', Ukraine, and after graduating from the Jewish school, he went on to study at the Kharkov Jewish Machine-Building Technicum. He then graduated from the Jewish division of the Moscow Pedagogical Institute and set off for Birobidzhan, where he worked in the editorial office of the newspaper Birobidzhaner shtern (Birobidzhan star). Returning from the Far East, he settled in Moscow, and when WWII broke out, he went to serve at the front. After being severely wounded, he was demobilized and returned to Moscow where he took up literary work. His first stories appeared in 1930, and they were later collected in a prose anthology that was published in 1932. The principal subject matter of them was the life then, the conditions, and the psychology of students, young laborers, and the learned. Until the war’s end, he published one more short book, Dos farblibene heftl (The surviving notebook), dedicated to the theme of war, which appeared in 1944. There was then for him, as there was for all other Soviet Yiddish writers, a huge interruption. He continued writing, but he had nowhere to publish his work until the journal Sovetish heymland (Soviet homeland) started appearing in print. From its very first issues, Gen’s new stories and novellas began to appear and later his novel Undzere tsaytn (Our time). For him this was a new genre. While the majority of Yiddish writers were drawn to the shtetl, Gen celebrated the large city in which his protagonists lived and worked. The critics remarked that every line in this novel made one sense the breath of modernity. For the first time in Yiddish literature, we find discussion of electronics, technical inventions, scientific dissertations and experiments, and production processes which were developed on the basis of modern science and technology. In this he was innovative, just as in the late 1920s the Yiddish prose author Meyer Alberton had been in his book Shakhtes (Mines). His storytelling manner and light humor were characteristically modest in Gen’s realistic style. Late in life, he made aliya to Israel and died in Bat Yam.

Among his books: Noveln (Short stories) (Kharkov, 1932), 88 pp.; In gutn mut, noveln (With good courage, short stories) (Moscow: Emes, 1941), 142 pp.; Dos farblibene heftl, war experiences (Moscow: Emes, 1944), 48 pp.; Undzere tsaytn (Moscow: Sovetski pisatel, 1972), 445 pp.; A veg in der vayt (A road in the distance) (Moscow: Sovetski pisatel, 1977), 449 pp.; In der heymshtot (In one’s hometown) (Moscow: Sovetski pisatel, 1981), 62 pp.; In krayz fun lebn (In the circle of life) (Moscow: Sovetski pisatel, 1983), 396 pp.; Fun baginen biz ovnt (From dawn to dusk) (Moscow: Sovetski pisatel, 1988), 475 pp.

Sources: P. Altman, “Unzer komyugishe proze” (Our Komyug [Jewish Communist Youth] prose), Prolit (February 1932); Y. Serebryani, in Eynikeyt (October 6, 1945); David Knaani and Arye Shamri, eds., Lo amut, ki eḥye (I shall not die, but live) (Merḥavya, 1957), p. 336.

[Additional information from: Berl Kagan, comp., Leksikon fun yidish-shraybers (Biographical dictionary of Yiddish writers) (New York, 1986), col. 165; 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), pp. 84-85.]