AYZIK HUBERMAN

AYZIK HUBERMAN (1906-1966)

            He was a poet and playwright, born in the town of Fel'shtyn (now, Gvardeysk), Podolia, Ukraine, into a family of craftsmen. Until 1920 he studied at a religious primary school and independently Yiddish and Russian. In 1921 he began studying at the local Jewish school, later in the district capital of Proskurov (now, Khmel'nyts'kyy). In 1926 he moved to Odessa and began his studies there at the Jewish Pedagogical Technicum. Following his graduation, he worked as a teacher in one of the Odessa schools, and from 1930 in the Pedagogical Technicum itself. In 1934 he became the literary director of the Odessa Yiddish State Theater.

            He debuted in print with poems in the newspaper Odeser arbeter (Odessa laborer) in 1929. The principal motifs of his poetry were the fate of the Jewish shtetl and its residents, who had lost their perspective in life and found it very difficult to adapt to the new circumstances created by the Soviet authorities, mentioning the “Reconstruction in the Past ‘Pale of Settlement.’” This was expressed with particular vividness in the lyrical poem “Fun mayn ankete” (From my questionnaire):

Downhill, downhill a broken wagon,

A wheel fallen on the roadway.

My father sits in it perplexed,

As my father goes downhill in it, downhill….

And it concludes:

Such sadness around, such loneliness, such pain,

In its midst, amid a silent storm, an old Jew cries…

My father, father, be the very last shopkeeper,

Be the last from the obscure, deserted market.

            In the first half of the 1930s, Huberman was very popular among Jewish students, especially his poetry cycle “Fun mayn ankete” which students from schools would recite at literary evenings. This cycle, incidentally, was the main accusation levelled at the poet when he was arrested on December 1, 1950 for “counter-revolutionary activity” as a “saboteur and nationalist.” Over the course of later years, several of his poetry collections, among them the poems “Podolye, mayn heym” (Podolia, my home), “A shtibl baym taykh” (A small house of prayer by the river), “Yevravmol,” and others, were published.

At the beginning of his literary activity, Huberman displayed an inclination for playwriting. In the late 1920s, he translated several librettos from operettas from the worldwide classical repertoire for the Odessa Theatrical Collective, among them: “Pericola” (La Périchole), “Maritsa” (Gräfin Mariza), and “Bayaderka” (La Bayadère). This was preparation for his subsequent creative work for his last two decades in the field of playwriting. His plays (largely, comedies) were staged in all of the Soviet Yiddish theaters, some of them translated into Russian. He served with the Red Army on the front against the Germans during WWII, returning to Odessa after the war. He was purged in 1950 together with other Odessa Yiddish writers, and he was sent to a camp in the North. He was among a small number of Yiddish writers who were saved from Stalinist liquidation. After rehabilitation, he returned to Odessa, strove to continue his work in playwriting, and with A. Shnayder he composed a libretto for a comedy entitled “Shenkl Tupanen, the Beloved” (in Russian), but his health had been so powerfully ruptured that he no longer had sufficient strength to continue writing. His final work, published in the journal Sovetish heymland (Soviet homeland) 4 (1966), was a story “Bay undz in felshtin” (With us in Fel'shtyn). He died in a Moscow hospital, and he was buried in the cemetery of his hometown of Odessa.

Among his books: Podolye, mayn heym, a poem (Kharkov-Kiev, 1934), 111 pp.; Dos meydl fun moskve, komedye in ferzn in dray aktn (The girl from Moscow, a comedy in verse in three acts) (Kiev: Ukrainian State Publishers for National Minorities, 1940), 133 pp.; A shtibl bam taykh, a poem (Kiev: Ukrainian State Publishers for National Minorities, 1939), 60 pp.  He translated from Ukrainian into Yiddish Oleksandr Korniychuk’s drama Platon kretshet (Platon Krechet) (Kharkov: Ukrainian State Publishers for National Minorities, 1936), 100 pp.  He was also the author of several staged dramas, such as: Veynt nit, mames (Don’t cry, Mothers)—about the German slaughter of Jews.  Among his unpublished, staged plays: A gast fun yener velt (A guest from the other world) (1940); Der pakhdn (The coward) (1943); Gliklekhe bagegenishn (Happy encounters) (1947); and “Keday tsu lebn af der velt” (Worth it to live in the world) (1948). A cycle of his poems appeared in Horizontn (Horizons) (Moscow, 1965); and his play Di erd iz kaylekhdik (The earth is round), Sovetish heymland 4 (1962).

Sources: H. Minik, in Shtern (Minsk) (October-November 1930); B. Shokhet (A. Oyerbakh), in Morgn-zhurnal (New York) (November 5, 1934); I. Fefer, in Eynikeyt (Moscow) (February 7, 1943); H. Bloshteyn and M. Pintshevski, in Eynikeyt (May 29, 1947); N. Mayzil, Dos yidishe shafn un der yidisher arbeter in sovetn-farband (Jewish creation and the Jewish worker in the Soviet Union) (New York, 1959), see index.

[Additional information from: Berl Kagan, comp., Leksikon fun yidish-shraybers (Biographical dictionary of Yiddish writers) (New York, 1986), col. 216; 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. 121-22.]