SHMARYE (SHMERKE) KATSHERGINSKI (SZMERKE KACZERGINSKI)

SHMARYE (SHMERKE) KATSHERGINSKI (SZMERKE KACZERGINSKI) (October 1908-April 23, 1954)

            He was born in Vilna.  He was orphaned at age six and was raised by a grandfather.  After graduating from the local Talmud Torah, he studied lithography and worked in this field in Vilna.  He was involved in secret Communist circles and was arrested several times.  With the emergence of “Yung vilne” (Young Vilna), he became one of the most active members of this literary group and contributed reportage pieces and a story to its organ Yung-vilne (1934-1936).  He made use of the pen name: Kh. Shmerke.  Of his poetry, “Bay-nakht iz gefaln a shney” (There was a snowfall at night) and “Tates, mames, kinderlekh boyen barikadn” (Fathers, mothers, the children are building barricades) were sung in Poland and abroad.  When Soviet Russia delivered Vilna to Lithuania, he departed with the Red Army.  For a short time, he worked as a teacher near Bialystok.  In June 1940 when the Soviets seized all of Lithuania, he returned to Vilna where he was active in various cultural work.  After the Germans invaded Soviet Russia in June 1941, he wandered through the Vilna hinterland, pretending to be a deaf mute.  In the spring of 1942, he entered the Vilna ghetto and became active there in the cultural realm and in the United Partisan Organization (Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye or F.P.O.).  He stole from German hands captured Yiddish manuscripts, old religious texts, and museum antiques and hid them in bunkers (after the war they were sent abroad, and a portion may now be found in YIVO in New York).  In September 1943 he fled to the woods, joined the partisans’ struggle, and with the seizure of Vilna by the Red Army (July 13, 1944), he returned.  Disappointed by his relations with the Soviet authorities in connection with rebuilding Jewish cultural institutions, in early 1946 he left for Poland.  He worked in Lodz for the Central Jewish Historical Commission, was active in Labor Zionism, and edited the weekly newspaper Unzer vort (Our word).  In July 1946 after the Kielce pogrom, he moved to Paris, visited Jewish refugee camps in Germany, and gave numerous speeches there.  In 1948 he traveled as a Parisian delegate to the founding conference of the Jewish Culture Congress.  In May 1950 he settled in Buenos Aires.  There he established the publishing house “Kiem” (Existence) and wrote articles for the Yiddish press.  He died in an airplane catastrophe in Mendoza, Argentina, while on a mission for the Jewish National Fund.  His stories, reportage pieces, poems, literary articles, and the drama Tsvish falndike vent (Between tumbling walls) were published in Shmerke katsherginski-ondenk-bukh (Memorial volume for Shmerke Katsherginski) (Buenos Aires, 1955), 571 pp.  His novel Yugnt on freyd (Youth without joy) remained in manuscript and its fate is unknown.  In book form: Undzer gezang (Our song), with musical notation (Warsaw, 1946), 224 pp.; Dos gezang fun vilner geto (The song of the Vilna ghetto) (Paris, 1947), 54 pp.  In large format: Khurbn vilne (The destruction of Vilna), preface by Max Weinreich (New York, 1947), XVI + 342 pp.; Partizaner geyen (The partisans are going) (Buenos Aires, 1947), 165 pp., improved edition (Bomberg-Munich, 1948), 174 pp.; Lider fun di getos un lagern (Songs of the ghettos and camps), texts and melodies, preface by H. Leivick (New York: Tsiko, 1948), XXXIX + 435 pp.; Tsvishn hamer un serp, tsu der geshikhte fun der likvidatsye fun der yidisher kultur in sovetn-farband (Between hammer and sickle, toward the history of the liquidation of Jewish culture in the Soviet Union) (Paris, 1949), 95 pp., enlarged edition (Buenos Aires, 1950), 123 pp.; Geto un yisroel lider (Ghetto and Israel songs), with musical notation (Buenos Aires, 1950), 24 pp.; Ikh bin geven a partisan, di grine legende (I was a partisan, the green legend) (Buenos Aires, 1952), 387 pp.  “His writing,” noted A. Mukdoni, “is always tied to action.  He literally cannot write in such a way…that is unconnected to concrete deeds to which he has not contributed, or to which he had no personal ties.  Sometimes this is reportage and sometimes it is literature, but the plot of the story itself remains concrete, real, and overt….  His drama Tsvishn falndike vent possesses genuine value….  For serious theater, it is worthwhile attending to the technically imperfect drama.”  Chaim Grade put it this way: “He takes along with himself all the streets of Vilna and Vilna youth who surrounded him twenty years earlier….  Partisans from the forests accompany him….  He walks amid high walls of religious texts and among stacks of books which with his own hands he collected amid the rubble…of the Vilna ghetto….  He spoke and sang in the language of our poor Vilna street.  He had the words, the tune, and the confidence of the people, and his songs quickly became folksongs.” 

Sources: Elye (Elias) Shulman, in Yung vilne (Young Vilna) (New York, 1946); A. Sutzkever, in Di goldene keyt (Tel Aviv) 19 (1954); Y. Kharlash, in Unzer tsayt (New York) (June 1954); Shmerke katsherginski-ondenk-bukh (Memorial volume for Shmerke Katsherginski) (Buenos Aires, 1955); A. Mukdoni, in Kultur un dertsiung (New York) (October 1955); Leyzer Ran, 25 yor yung vilne (Twenty-five years of Young Vilna) (New York, 1955); Y. Yanasovitsh, in Di prese (Buenos Aires) (April 11, 1956); Y. Bashevis, in Forverts (New York) (October 1, 1961).

Elye (Elias) Shulman