LYUBE TSHERNYAK

LYUBE TSHERNYAK (1902-1970)

            She was a Soviet Jewish poet and literary critic, the younger sister of Yoysef Tshernyak, born in the town of Khotimsk (Khotsimsk), Byelorussia. She debuted in print with a poem in the journal Di royte velt (The red world) in Kharkov in 1927, and from that time she was an active member of the Moscow literary group Yungvald (Young forest). A lyrical poem of hers appears in Ezra Korman’s Yidishe dikhterins (Jewish women poets) (Chicago: L. M. Shteyn, 1928). She initially studied for a short time at the pedagogical institute in Kamenets-Podolsk (Ukraine), later becoming a research student at the Kiev Institute for Jewish Culture in the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. She later published poems in Yunger boy-klang (Young sound of construction) in Kharkov. During the latter half of the 1950s, she worked intensively compiling an anthology of Soviet Yiddish poetry, which should have been published in Russian translation by the Moscow publisher Goslitizdat (State publisher of literature), but it did not happen. When the journal Sovetish heymland (Soviet homeland) commenced publication in Moscow [in 1961], she once again became active working in the field of Yiddish literary criticism and contributed to the first issue of Sovetish heymland an article about Yiddish writers in Birobidzhan: (July-August 1961), pp. 118-21. In subsequent issues, she published a series of articles dedicated to the creative work of Buzi Miler, Shmuel Rosin, Lyube Vaserman, Yashe Zeldin, and others.

Sources: Ezra Korman, Yidishe dikhterins (Jewish women poets) (Chicago, 1928), pp. 334-35, 344; A. D. Miral, in Eynikeyt (Moscow) (December 31, 1946).

Zaynvl Diamant 

[Additional information from: 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. 170-71.]