MOYSHE KARPINOVITSH

MOYSHE KARPINOVITSH (1882-1941)

            He was a journalist, born in Lahoysk, Minsk Province.  His father was a rabbi.  He attended religious primary school and yeshiva, later he learned the trade of a printshop worker.  He was the founder of the Vilna Yiddish People’s Theater and director of a series of well-known Yiddish theatrical troupes.  In 1908 he was the impresario of Sholem-Aleichem’s tour of Byelorussian and Lithuania.  In 1905 he published a daily paper Vilner togblat (Vilna daily newspaper) and in 1911 the daily Folksblat (People’s newspaper).  Using the pen name Moyshele, he wrote theater reviews in the latter.  In 1912 he published Vokhnblat (Weekly newspaper) in Minsk.  His newspapers did not exist for terribly long because of persecutions from the censors.  He dramatized for the stage Sholem-Aleichem’s Stempenyu, which was performed in the Yiddish theater.  He died in the Minsk Ghetto.

Sources: Zalmen Zilbertsvayg, Leksikon fun yidishn teater (Handbook of the Yiddish theater), vol. 5 (Mexico City, 1966); Yanos Turkov, Farloshene shtern (Extinguished stars), vol. 2 (Buenos Aires, 1953), pp. 186-96; Zigmunt Turkov, Di ibergerisene tekufe, fragmentn fun mayn lebn (The interrupted era, fragments from my life) (Buenos Aires: Central Publisher of Polish Jews in Argentina, 1961), see index.

Ruvn Goldberg