AYZIK ZARETSKI (ISAAC ZARETZKI)

AYZIK ZARETSKI (ISAAC ZARETZKI) (1891-August 27, 1956)

            He was a linguist, born in Pinsk, Byelorussia. His father was a teacher of general subject matter in the local Talmud Torah and the author of a Russian-language textbook for arithmetic. Ayzik studied in a “cheder metukan” (improved religious elementary school), a state public school, and later graduated from a senior high school. Over the years 1913-1917, he studied mathematics at the University of Dorpat (Yuryev) in Estonia, at the same time expanding and deepening his knowledge of the Yiddish language and literature. In his student years in Dorpat, he was an active leader in the local “Academic Association for Jewish History and Literature,” where he led a struggle for the dignity of Yiddish and democratic principles generally; he was the first, with the founding of the Association, to give lectures in Yiddish, and he also worked in the field of Bible criticism and (together with Arn Vorobaytshik) on questions of Yiddish philology (from 1917). He also campaigned for a certain period of time on behalf of Esperanto within the student body. In the summers of 1915 and 1916, during WWI, he worked in Pinsk and Samara among the Jewish homeless refugees due to the war, people who had been evacuated there from the western areas of the front. This direct contact with Yiddish speakers of various dialectal regions stimulated his innate interest in language research, and to this era belongs the very first point of his subsequent work in the realm of folklore. After the February-March Revolution of 1917, he established classes for Jewish laborers in Dorpat, joined the Bund in Samara, split from the organization in Samara in 1918, grew closer to the Bolsheviks, joined the Communist Party in 1919, served as manager of the Jewish division in the Commissariat of Education in Samara, organized a Jewish section in the local Communist Party, and eliminated the study of Tanakh and Hebrew from Jewish educational institutions. For a short period of time in 1920, he was manager of the Jewish educational division of the People’s Commissariat of National Minorities in Moscow, and he established a Yiddish philological commission which fell apart in 1921 when Zaretski left Moscow for Kharkov. The most important activist for Yiddish orthographic reform in the Soviet Union, he published a series of articles on spelling in Yiddish in: Kultur un bildung (Culture and education) 1 and 2-3 (Moscow, 1920); Pedagogisher byuletin (Pedagogical bulletin) (Moscow, 1922); Zhizn' natsional'nostei (Life of nationalities) (Moscow, 1921); and the pamphlet Klolim fun dem reformirtn yidishn oysleyg (Rules of reformed Yiddish spelling) (Odessa, 1922), 16 pp., which proposed as well new rules for orthography regarding Hebraisms in Yiddish and raised a list of words with questionable spelling. He was sent in July 1921 to Kharkov to do cultural research, and there he founded a Yiddish philological commission similar to the one he had established the previous year in Moscow; in carrying out his mandate, he traveled through the main Jewish communities in Byelorussia and Ukraine, visited the Jewish colony of Fraydorf (Free village), Kherson district, where he helped improve the subject of Yiddish in the local schools, while he studied on site the Yiddish of the old-timers among the Jewish colonists himself. In 1923 the philological commission, under his editorship, brought out the collection Yidish (Yiddish) (Kharkov, 48 pp.), in which he published the works: “Vegn an eynheytlekher yidisher shprakh” (On a unified Yiddish language); “Yidishe elementar-geometrishe terminologye” (Elementary geometric terminology in Yiddish); and “Vegn di shlos-oysyes in Yidish” (On the final consonants in Yiddish). From that time, he published (in the most important Yiddish journals and periodical publications in Soviet Russia) approximately 300 articles and major studies concerned with various issues in Yiddish linguistics, Yiddish teaching methods, theoretical linguistics, and critical treatises concerning Yiddish and general pedagogical works.

In the late 1920s he received the title of professor. He was lecturer in mathematics at the Proletkult (Proletarian culture [an artistic institution]), lecturer in Yiddish and mathematics at the three-year Yiddish pedagogical course in Kharkov, and a contributor to the chair in scholarly research in linguistics in Moscow; he also took part in Yiddish philological research at the Invayskult (Jewish studies department) in Minsk. In late 1926 he was in Moscow, professor of grammar in the Department of Literature and Linguistics in the Pedagogical Faculty of Number 2 Moscow State University. His foundational work, Praktishe yidishe gramatik (Practical Yiddish grammar), was the first extensive, synthetic work in the field of Yiddish grammar. From the late 1930s, he was working in the field of Russian linguistics and, after WWII, he became professor of Russian language at the Pedagogical Institute in the city of Kursk, where he lived in his later years, in surroundings alien to Yiddish, but still in contact from there with friends—researchers in the field of Yiddish linguistics in all parts of Soviet Russia. He had in manuscript, almost completed, a number of important studies, such as: a study of the language of Jewish colonists in Crimea and a handful of works in Jewish folklore. He died in Kursk.

            His published books include: Praktishe yidishe gramatik (Moscow: Shul un bukh, 1926), 236 pp., second edition (Moscow, 1927); Grayzn un sfeykes, kapitlen stilistishe gramatik (Errors and doubts, chapters of a stylistic grammar) (Kiev: Kultur-lige, 1927), 152 pp.; Shprakh-arbet bukh farn 2tn lernyor (Language workbook for the second school year), co-authored with a colleague (Moscow: Central Soviet People’s Press, 1928), 104 pp.; Bazunderheyt fun yidish kegn rusish (The distinctiveness of Yiddish vis-à-vis Russian) (Moscow, 1928), 31 pp.; Yidishe gramatik (Yiddish grammar), newly reworked edition (Vilna: B. Kletskin, 1929), 311 pp.; Kurs fun yidisher shprakh (Course in the Yiddish language) (Moscow, 1929), 95 pp.; Shprakh, arbet-bukh farn 3nt lernyor (Language, workbook for the third year of school) (Moscow: Central Soviet People’s Press, 1929; Moscow, 1930), 119 pp.; Yidishe shprakh far lerers (The Yiddish language for teachers) (Moscow: Central Soviet People’s Press, 1930), 121 pp.; Far a proletarisher shprakh (For a proletarian language) (Kharkov: Central Publishers, 1931), 118 pp.; Yidishe funktuatsye (Yiddish functionality), with Elye Falkovitsh (Kiev, 1931), 47 pp.; Yidishe ortografye, klolim fun nayem Yidishn oysleyg (Yiddish orthography, rules for a new Yiddish spelling) (Moscow: Central Soviet People’s Press, 1931), 38 pp.; Gramatik un ortografye, teyl 1, farn ershtn un tsveytn klas (Grammar and orthography, part 1, for the first and second class) (Kiev: Ukrainian State Publishers for National Minorities, 1934), 100 pp., newer printings (Kiev: Ukrainian State Publishers for National Minorities, 1935, 1936, 1937, 1938), second edition (Kovno, Kiev-Lvov, 1940), 96 pp., with Khayim Loytsker, part 2, third edition (1935), 132 pp., newer printings (1936, 1937, 1938); Shprakh arbetbukh farn ershtn kontsenter, bukh farn lerer (Language workbook for the first stage of secondary education, book for the teacher) (Moscow, 1934), 220 pp.; Yidish far der onfangshul (Yiddish for primary school), a textbook for grammar and spelling, part 1 (Moscow: Emes, 1933), 96 pp., part 2, 120 pp., reprinted several times; Metodik fun yidish, baylage tsu di lernbikher far der onfang-shul (Teaching method for Yiddish, supplement to the textbooks for primary school) (Moscow: Emes, 1935), 118 pp. He translated from Russian: Matematik: aritmetik, algebre (Mathematics: arithmetic, algebra), edited by Dovid Hokhberg (Kiev, 1921), 68 pp.; and Lebedintsevs algebra (Lebedintsev’s algebra) (Vilna: Kletskin, 1924), 184 pp. He edited Sintaksisher ufgaber far shuln fun hekhern tip (Syntactical issues for schools of the higher level) (Moscow-Minsk, Central Publ., 1931), 165 pp.

Sources: Zalmen Reyzen, Leksikon, vol. 1; Toyznt yor pinsk (One thousand years of Pinsk) (New York, 1941), p. 317; Shmuel Niger, in Tog (New York) (October 30, 1932); Avrom Abtshuk, Etyudn un materialn tsu der geshikhte fun der yidisher literatur bavegung in FSRR (Studies and material for the history of the Yiddish literature movement in the Soviet Union) (Kharkov, 1934), p. 25; Yudl Mark, in Yivo-bleter (New York) 17 (1941), p. 231; Kh. Nadler, in Eynikeyt (Moscow) (July 5, 1947); Y. Tshernyak, in Yidishe shriftn (Warsaw) (April 1957); Folks-shtime (Warsaw) (July 18, 1957).

Borekh Tshubinski

[Additional information from: Berl Kagan, comp., Leksikon fun yidish-shraybers (Biographical dictionary of Yiddish writers) (New York, 1986), cols. 258-59; 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. 149-51.]