AVROM-AYZIK DAMESEK

AVROM-AYZIK DAMESEK (b. 1893)

            He was born in Pinsk, and he studied in religious primary school and in the Odessa yeshiva of Kh. Tshernovits.  In 1918 he was active for a time in the Labor Zionist movement, as well as a teacher in the Jewish schools in Poland.  In 1926 he departed for Soviet Russia.  He taught in Jewish schools and assumed posts in Kharkov and Minsk.  He served on the editorial board of Shtern (Star) in Minsk until the middle of 1935.  He wrote Communist literary criticism and appeared as a speaker at general Soviet writers’ conferences.  He contributed to various Soviet Jewish publications and published reviews of works by M. Kulbak, Z. Akselrod, Kadye Molodovski, and others in Shtern.  In issue 10 (1936) of this journal, he published one of the most aggressive articles opposing the critic Kh. Dunets.  This was the beginning of the gruesome Moscow trials.  He also translated into Yiddish Gruntfragen fun marksizm (Fundamental problems of Marxism [original: Osnovnye voprosy marksizma]) by Plekhanov, with Y. Rabinovitsh (Warsaw, 1929), 190 pp.  He compiled the anthology Lebn un kamf, zamlbukh fun der yidisher linker literatur in poyln (Life and struggle, collection of the Yiddish leftist literature in Poland) (Minsk, 1936), 129 pp.  He died during the liquidations of the late 1930s.