FEYGE HOFSHTEYN

FEYGE HOFSHTEYN (b. September 20, 1897)

            The widow of Dovid Hofshteyn, she was born in Kremenets, Volhynia.  She was raised in a traditional Jewish home.  She graduated from high school in Kremenets.  In 1921 she studied at the medical pedalogical institute in Moscow.  In 1925 she left with her husband for Berlin and from there to Israel; from 1929 she was living in Kiev (her husband having returned there in 1926).  Five years after the September 16, 1948 arrest of Dovid Hofshteyn, she was exiled with her family to Siberia.  In 1956, following the rehabilitation of her husband, she returned to Kiev, and in 1973 made aliya to Israel.  In Moscow she published, with Shifra Kholodenko, Dovid Hofshteyn’s Geklibene verk (Collected works), one volume in Yiddish, three volumes in Russian translation and one in Ukrainian.  In 1977 she published Lider un poemes fun dovid hofshteyn (Poems of Dovid Hofshteyn) (Tel Aviv: Yisroel-bukh), 2 vols., and a collection of his poems in Hebrew, translated by K. A. Bertini: Zikhron dami heveti (I brought the memory of my blood) (Tel Aviv: Reshafim, 1984), 140 pp., a number of them originals which Dovid Hofshteyn had written at the time that he was in Israel in 1926.  In book form: Mit libe un veytik, vegn dovid hofshteyn (With love and pain, concerning Dovid Hofshteyn) (Tel Aviv: Reshafim, 1985), 79 pp.

Berl Kagan, comp., Leksikon fun yidish-shraybers (Biographical dictionary of Yiddish writers) (New York, 1986), cols. 541-42.