MIRON VOLFSON

MIRON VOLFSON (1880-1932)

            He was a publisher, born in Homel (Gomel), Byelorussia. He first published articles, 1895-1896, in the newspaper Hamelits (The advocate). At age twenty he joined the revolutionary movement, publishing articles in illegal publications. In subsequent years, he studied law, mathematics, and medicine at Kharkov and Yur'yev (Tartu) Universities. He helped prepare publications of the Great and Technical Encyclopedias of the publisher Prosbeshchenie (Education), as well as the Yevreiskaia entsiklopediia (Jewish encyclopedia) put out by Brockhaus and Efron. In the first years after the Revolution, he lived in Ukraine, doing Party work. In those years he also did work for the Jewish publishing houses. In 1921 he moved to Moscow and worked for Gosizdat (State publishers), and in 1923 he was among the initiating group to publish Sovetskaia entsiklopediia (Soviet encyclopedia). He also contributed to bring out Lenin’s first collection of writings.

He authored: Di ekonomishe formen funem ratnfarband (The economic formations of the Soviet Union) (Moscow: Central Publishers, 1925), 159 pp.; and Polit-ivre far politshuln (Political grammar for political schools), part one (Kiev: Kultur-lige, 1926), 234 pp.

Berl Kagan, comp., Leksikon fun yidish-shraybers (Biographical dictionary of Yiddish writers) (New York, 1986), col. 230; 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), p. 130.