NOSN SHATSKI

NOSN SHATSKI (b. 1900)

            He was a journalist and stenographer, born in Łoša, Byelorussia. He began work as a typesetter at age fifteen in a Minsk print shop. From 1930 he was a member of the Communist Party. He graduated from the Minsk Pedagogical Institute and the Minsk Juridical Institute, and he went on to take up teaching Yiddish language and literature in a Minsk middle school. In the late 1920s, when a Yiddish division was opened in the Byelorussian Academy of Sciences, he was invited to be a contributor. In the 1920s, he published stories, sketches, and articles in: Emes (Truth), Oktyabr (October), Shtern (Star), and Afn shprakhfront (On the language front), among other serials. Working as a page designer for the Minsk newspaper Oktyabr, he devised an original system for Yiddish stenography, and he became the first teacher of this system organized in 1927 by the Byelorussian Educational Committee. In later years, he published a textbook and handbooks, as well as a series of articles on stenography and stenotype. During WWII he was at the front, and after demobilization he lived in the city of Zlatoust. In 1958 he moved to Moscow, and in later years he published in Sovetish heymland (Soviet homeland). He made aliya to Israel in 1994.

In book form: Yidishe stenografye far zelbstbildung (Yiddish stenography for self-education) (Minsk: Central Publishers, 1929), 184 pp.; Stenotipye, kurtsshrift far der shrayb-mashinke un pen (Stenotype, shorthand for the typewriter and pen) (Minsk: Byelorussian Academy of Sciences, 1935), 41 pp.

Source: Sovetish heymland (Moscow) 3 (1977).

Berl Cohen 

[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), p. 377.]