AVROM TRUBOTSHIST (ABRAHAM TRUBOCHIST)

AVROM TRUBOTSHIST (ABRAHAM TRUBOCHIST) (1870-November 30, 1971)

            He was born in Riga, Latvia.  He was a traveling businessman for a large Russian firm, and as its representative he traveled to China, Japan, India, South Africa, and the United States, in addition to various parts of the Russian empire.  When he grew older, he took up the pen and recounted his encounters and experiences in short episodes which he published in a variety of Yiddish newspapers in Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland, as well as in America.  He also contributed to humorous Yiddish publications in Riga and himself edited the comedic magazines: Blintses (Blintzes) (Riga: Shavuot eve, 1930/1931) and Shalakhmones (Presents exchanged on Purim) (Riga, 1932/1933).  In 1937 he published a book entitled Farvorfene shvotim fun yisroel, a rayze iber azye un afrike (Castaway tribes of Israel, a voyage through Asia and Africa) (Riga: Skola, 1937), 128 pp., which includes short descriptions of Jewish life in China, Japan, Malabar (India), Algiers, Morocco, Abyssinia, the Saharan Desert, Djibouti, Siberia, and the Caucasus.  Under the Nazis he was confined in the Riga ghetto.  He died in the “Great Aktion” of November 1941.

Sources: M. Gerts, 25 yor yidishe prese in letland (25 years of the Yiddish press in Latvia) (Riga, 1933), p. 63; A. Riger, Yizker-almanakh fun riger relif (Memorial almanac of Riga relief) (New York) 3 (1948), pp. 8-9; B. Mark, Umgekumene shrayber fun di getos un lagern (Murdered writers from the ghettos and camps) (Warsaw, 1954), p. 210.