RUVN LIPSHITS (R. LIPSZYC)

RUVN LIPSHITS (R. LIPSZYC) (May 15, 1918-May 1, 1975)

            He was born in Warsaw, Poland.  He studied music in the Warsaw Conservatory.  He was a writer for Polish revue theaters.  During WWII he was confined in the Warsaw Ghetto and in German camps.  He was liberated by the American army, and he lived thereafter in survivors’ (displaced persons’) camps in Germany, where he was a cofounder of a revue theater “Di goldene pave” (The golden peacock) for which he wrote a series of numbers and prepared (together with Vera Haken) the program “Az men lebt, derlebt men” (If you live long enough, you’ll see everything [freely translated]).  From 1950 he was in the United States.  At first, he wrote satirical poems in Polish and published them in Szpilki (Pins) and other Polish satirical magazines.  In the Warsaw Ghetto, he switched to Yiddish and wrote song which were sung as folk tunes of anonymous writers; a number of them were later included in his book Tsu zingen un tsu zogn (To sing and to speak) (Munich, 1949).  He published his first songs in Unzer shtime (Our voice) in Bergen-Belsen (1946), and from that point he contributed to: Unzer veg (Our way), Dos vort (The word), and Yidishe bilder (Jewish images) in Munich.  In book form: Lebedik amkho, a zamlung lider (Ordinary living Jews, a collection of songs) (Bergen-Belsen, 1946), 32 pp.; Tsu zingen un tsu zogn (To sing and to speak), “ghetto, folk, and Israeli songs” (Munich, 1949), 80 pp.  From 1963 he was living in Chicago, where he died.

Sources: B. Groybard, in Dos vort (Munich) (May 12, 1948); N. Horovitz, in Fun noentn over (New York) 1 (1955), pp. 136, 138, 146, 159, 166, 175; Jacob Robinson and Philip Friedman, Guide to Jewish History under Nazi Impact (New York, 1960), no. 3556.

Khayim Leyb Fuks

[Additional information from: Berl Kagan, comp., Leksikon fun yidish-shraybers (Biographical dictionary of Yiddish writers) (New York, 1986), col. 338.]