VELVL REDKO

VELVL REDKO (August 1918-1941)

            He was a poet, born in Linets (Ilintsi), Ukraine. He graduated from the Yiddish department of the Moscow Pedagogical Institute. He worked in Kiev on the editorial board of the newspaper Der shtern (The star). He did not apparently take up a teaching post, for in June 1941 he was mobilized and died in the first battles on the Soviet-German front near Kaniets, Kiev district. He began write literary works in the latter half of the 1930s. In addition to poetry, he wrote literary critical articles. Although he apparently did not produce a work of his own, he was adjudged one of the more talented poets. His first poems were published in Onheyb, almanakh fun shrayber onfanger (Beginning, almanac of starting writers) (Kiev: Ukrainian State Publishers for National Minorities, 1940). Of his few published poems during his life and after his death (in Sovetish heymland [Soviet homeland] in Moscow 3 [1963] and 2 [1979]), one can see here a poet with talent died too young. His poetry cycle “Af mir a biks shoyn vart” (A gun is waiting for me) appeared in Lire (Lyre) (Moscow: Sovetski pisatel, 1985); and in S’vet zayn a shturem (There is going to be a storm) (Tel Aviv: Leivick Publishers, 2004).

Khayim Maltinski

[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. 367.]