KUBI VOHL

KUBI VOHL (August 31, 1911-December 27, 1935)

            He was born in Kimpulung, South Africa.  He studied in religious primary school, later in a German school.  He first published poetry in German in the Bukovina press.  In 1932 he moved to Czernowitz, where (under the influence of Y. Paner) he began to write in Yiddish and until his death he published poems of lyrical-social and revolutionary content.  He contributed to practically all of the radical Yiddish publications in Romania over the years 1932-1935, including: Shoybn (Glass panes), Inzl (Island), Ikuf-bleter (Pages from IKUF [Jewish Cultural Association]), and Tshernovitser bleter (Czernowitz pages), among others—as well as Literarishe bleter (Literary leaves) and Literarishe tribune (Literary tribune) in Warsaw; and in illegal publications in Poland and in publications of the Proletpen group in the United States.  His poems “Hunger” (Hunger) and “Masn-kvorim” (Mass graves) were dramatized and staged by Moyshe Broderzon in “Ararat” [acronym for: Artistic Revolutionary Revue-Theater] in Lodz.  He died of tuberculosis in Czernowitz.  He authored: Der meteor, zikhroynes, opshatsungen, lider, briv (The meteor: memoirs, critiques, poems, letters) (Haifa, 1980), 120, 93 pp.—in Yiddish and German.

Sources: Y. D. Izrael, in Oyfgang (Sighet-Marmației) (November-December 1935); Y. Yakir, in Shoybn (Bucharest) 1 (1936); Literarishe bleter (Warsaw) (March 13, 1936); Y. Paner, in Ikuf-bleter (Bucharest) 1 (1946); Y. Kara, in Folksshtime (Warsaw) (February 8, 1958); Kara, in Yidishe kultur (New York) (April 1958).

Khayim Leyb Fuks

[Additional information from: Berl Kagan, comp., Leksikon fun yidish-shraybers (Biographical dictionary of Yiddish writers) (New York, 1986), col. 226.]