AVROM YOFE (JOFFE, ABRAM DEBORIN)

AVROM YOFE (JOFFE, ABRAM DEBORIN) (June 16, 1881-March 8, 1963)

            He was born in Upine (Upyna), Kovno district, Lithuania.  He grew up in Kovno where he studied at a religious elementary school and a Russian public school.  He later studied history, philosophy, and social science at the Universities of Berlin and Berne.  He was a member at the time of the student group connected to the foreign committee of the Bund.  In 1908 he returned to Russia.  From 1910 he was living in Warsaw and from 1915 in Ekaterinoslav, where he was head plenipotentiary for Yekopo (Yevreyskiy komitet pomoshchi zhertvam voyny—“Jewish Relief Committee for War Victims”) in Southern Russia.  Over the years 1918-1920, he was chairman of the united Jewish organizations—ORT (Association for the Promotion of Skilled Trades), OZE (Obschestvo zdravookhraneniia evreev—Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jewish Population), and Yekopo—in St. Petersburg.  In 1921 he left the Bund and went over to the Communists.  He began writing for Kautsky’s Die Neue Zeit (The new times) in Stuttgart in 1905, later publishing philosophical pieces in Russian-language liberal and socialist journals under the pseudonym “A. Deborin,” which he used until the end of his life.  He began writing in Yiddish for Fraynd (Friend) in St. Petersburg in 1908, and he signed his articles with the letter F.; later, during his time in Warsaw, he was a member of the editorial board and wrote weekly political reports for Vokhnblat (Weekly newspaper) affiliated with Fraynd.  He also contributed to Tsukunft (Future) in New York, in which, among other items, he published in 1914 a detailed critique of the first four volumes of Dr. Chaim Zhitlovsky’s Gezamlte shriftn (Collected works) and his own treatises on Fichte and Lassalle.  From 1925 he was a professor of philosophy at the Institute of Marx and Engels in Moscow.  He edited the Russian theoretical journal Pod znamenem marksizma (Under the banner of Marxism) in Moscow.  He was the author (in Russian and German) of a great number of works of a philosophical Marxist character, several of which were translated into Yiddish (by Y. Goldberg): Ludvig fayerbakh (Ludwig Feuerbach); Lenin der kemfndiker materialist (Lenin the fighting materialist); Shpinoza der forgeyer, in likht fun materyalizm (Spinoza the forerunner, in light of materialism) (Warsaw, 1930), 24 pp.  He died in Moscow.

Sources: Zalmen Reyzen, Leksikon, vol. 1; G. Aronson, Kniga o Russkom Evreistve 1917-1967 (Volume on Russian Jewry, 1917-1967) (New York, 1960), p. 387.

Khayim Leyb Fuks