YOYSEF ZILBERMAN

YOYSEF ZILBERMAN (1882-1936)

            He was born in Tarnopol, eastern Galicia.  At age nine he was orphaned, and he was raised by a family in Tarnov (Tarnów).  Until he was ten, he studied in a religious primary school, thereafter going to work as a laborer.  He moved to England in 1898, was active in the Jewish unions and in the anarchist movement.  He later lived in Belgium and France, before returning to England.  From 1918 until his death, he lived in Antwerp, Belgium.  For a time he worked with purses, later becoming a merchant and serving as chairman of the association of Jewish market merchants.  He survived a family tragedy which drove him to insanity.  He committed suicide in Brussels by hanging in the summer of 1936.  He authored Mayn lebn (My life) (Brussels, 1934), 330 pp. and 52 pp., an autobiographical work which was simultaneously a study of family life in France and Belgium generally.

Sources: Archival materials from YIVO (New York); Sh. Yanovski, Ershte yorn fun yidishn frayhaytlekhn sotsyalizm (The first years of Jewish free socialism) (New York, 1948), p. 214.

Khayim Leyb Fuks