TUVYE HEYLIKMAN

TUVYE HEYLIKMAN (1870-April 24, 1948)

            A historian, current events writer, and teacher, he was born in Homyel', Byelorussia, into a well-to-do family.  His father, Borekh Heylikman, owned a dry goods store and was a devout Jew, and he provided a traditional Jewish education for his son.  Heylikman attended religious elementary school and high school, later a Russian high school, and later still the law faculty of Kiev University, where he joined illegal student circles.  During the mass arrest of 200 Jewish students in Kiev involved in 1898 in the revolutionary movement, he was among those arrested.  He was affiliated with Vladimir Medem who was also at the time a student at Kiev University.  In the “Jewish Student Organization” founded in Kiev in the fall of 1899, he distinguished himself as one of the theoretical initiators of the special “group of intellectual Jews” who around 1901-1902 transformed themselves into the group “Frayhayt” (Freedom) associated with the Bund.  After completing university, he traveled as an emissary for his party to various cities in Western and Central Russia and contributed (using the pseudonym “Sozhin”) to the Moscow Russian-language daily newspaper Kur'yer (Courier) in 1903 and the social-democratic journal Pravda (Truth) in Moscow (1904); he also served as editor (together with Rafael Abramovitsh and Vladimir Medem) of the Bundist journal in Russian, Nashe slovo (Our word) in Vilna (1906), in which he published major works on the Sejmist “revival” and “territorial autonomy,” and he contributed to other Bundist and general social democratic publications.  In 1912 he translated into Russian for the Moscow “universal library” Yankev Gordin’s dramas Mirele efros (Mirele Efros) and Got, mentsh un tayvl (God, man, and devil), which were staged that year in Korsh’s Theater in Moscow.  In 1915 he published in the Russian collection Evreiskii vopros v Pol’she (The Jewish question in Poland) an essay on “Territorial and Cultural-Nationalist Autonomy.”

            During the Revolution of February-March 1917, he was living in Moscow where he was engaged in legal affairs and was a member of the leading organs of the Bund, of the management of the Moscow Jewish community, and on the editorial board of the Bundist monthly Di hofnung (The hope), edited by R. Abramovitsh (August-December 1917).  The Revolution began a new period for Heylikman. In 1918 he served on the organizing committee of the first conference of Jewish communities in Russia, and at the conference he read a speech about the budget for Jewish communities; he was arrested by the Bolshevik authorities and imprisoned in the Butyrka Prison in Moscow.  He also took part in editing the Bundist anthology Tsum ondenk fun karl marks, a zamelbukh tsum hundert yorikn yoyvl, 1818-1918 (To the memory of Karl Marx, a collection to mark the one hundredth anniversary of his birth, 1818-1918) (Moscow: Bund, 1918), 115 pp.  During the rift in the Bund in April 1920, Heylikman joined the central committee of the social democratic Bund, and in February 1921 he was once again arrested by the Bolsheviks.  In 1924, after switching to the Communists, he became a lecturer in the “Jewish Section of the Communist University of the National Minorities of the West” (the “Mayrevke”) named for Yu. Markhlevski in Moscow. As a result of his lectures and intensive historical research, his book, Geshikhte fun der gezelshaftlekher bavegung fun di idn in poyln un rusland (History of the social movement of Jews in Poland and Russia), part 1, 244 pp., was published by the Central People’s Publishing House in Moscow in 1926. Basically, he was a philosopher and methodologist; he was more interested in general philosophical and sociological issues than with concrete historical ones. In this connection, he also published “Borekh shpinoze” (Baruch Spinoza) in Di royte velt (The red world) (Kharkov) 4.12 (1927), pp. 95-103, and “Di yidn in onheyb fun rusisher untertanshaft” (The Jews at the beginning of Russian subjection), in Visnshaftlekhe yorbikher (Scholarly yearbooks) (Moscow, 1929), pp. 17-33; “Der vidershtand fun di yidishe folks-masn kegn napoleons invazye” (The resistance of the Jewish folk masses to Napoleon’s invasion), Shtern (Star) 6 (1939); “Rekrutshine” (the drafting of Jewish boys into the Tsarist army), Forpost (Outpost) 2 (1938).

            A convinced Marxist, he “tormented” himself as to how a historian could deal with the issue: Can one apply Marxism to studying Jewish history? And, if not, then how can one speak generally about the history of the Jews? On this very topic, he published an article in the Yiddish journal Mayrevnik. In connection with his lectures at the Communist University, he produced the Geshikhte mentioned above, and this work, in which he attempted to explain in the Marxist spirit, aroused a sharp critique among foreign scholarly circles, but in 1926 it was explained at the conference of Jewish party sections how it was a “beginning of Marxist Jewish historiography,” and this emboldened the author to expand and publish in 1930 a Russian variant of the work. At the same time, Heylikman was teaching history and philosophy at a number of Moscow colleges and published in collections and journals various historical works, such as: “Evrei v Rossii” (The Jews of Russia), in Bolʹshaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia (Great Soviet encyclopedia), vol. 24 (Moscow, 1932), cols. 58-85; and the chapters on Jewish history in the multi-volume Russian publication, Istoriia SSSR (History of the USSR). In the years of WWII, he was a member of the historical commission of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. In the last months of his life, he completed the first volume of A geshikhte fun yidn in fss"r (A history of Jews in the USSR)—whether or not it was published remains unknown. He died in Moscow, prior to the arrests of the Anti-Fascist Committee.

Sources: Zalmen Reyzen, Leksikon, vol. 1; D. Zaslovski, “Tsu der geshikhte fun ‘bund’ in kiev” (On the history of the “Bund” in Kiev), in Royter pinkes (Red records), first collection (Warsaw, 1921), pp. 70, 72-79; Vl. Medem, Fun mayn lebn (From my life), part 2 (Warsaw, 1923), pp. 132-33; “Historishe komisye baym antifashistishn komitet” (Historical commission of the Ant-Fascist Committee), Eynikeyt (Moscow) (March 2, 1946); obituary notice for Heylikman in Eynikeyt (April 27, 1948); F. Kurski, Gezamlte shriftn (Collected writings) (New York, 1952), p. 355; oral information from Grigori Aronson in New York.

Yitskhok Kharlash 

[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. 123-25]