SH. EYNZAFT

SH. EYNZAFT (1889-December 4, 1929)

Born in Zhitomir (Zhytomyr) into a family of laborers.  He was a member of the Jewish Socialist Workers Party (SERP [Sotsialisticheskaya evreiskaya rabochaya partiya]).  He was arrested in 1908 and exiled for three years.  In 1914 he moved to the Bund, and in 1915 he was a delegate to the southwestern conference of the party in Kiev.  Shortly thereafter he was once again arrested and banished to Irkutsk.  After the February Revolution in 1917, he returned on his own and became active in the trade union movement and in the workers’ cooperatives.  During the German occupation, he was again arrested and for a longer period of time he remained in jail.  He began his scholarly-literary activity in 1922 while studying in the “Institute of Red Professors.”  His books include: Di zubatovishe un gaponishe bavegungen (The movement of Zubatov and Gapon) (Minsk, 1926), 167 pp.; Di gapon-bavegung un der 9ter yanuar (The Gapon movement and January 9^th) (Kharkov, 1926), 50 pp.; “Di dorem-mayrevdike konferents fun ‘bund’ in 1915” (The southwestern conference of the Bund in 1915), in Visnshaftlekhe yorbikher (Scholarly yearbooks), vol. 1 (Moscow, 1929).  He also wrote memoirs about the Jewish self-defense in Zhitomir as well as a series of works in Russian on general matters concerning the workers’ movement in Russia, among them the work of the “economic struggle of the Bialystok textile laborers in the 1880s and 1890s,” which had a connection with Jewish history.

Sources: “A yor arbet fun der gezelshaft tsu shtudirn di yidishe shprakh, literatur un geshikhte” (A year’s work of the society for the study of Yiddish language, literature, and history), Tsayshrift no. 2-3 (Minsk, 1928); “P. S. Eynzaft,” in Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie sredi evreev (Revolutionary movement among the Jews), vol. 1 (Moscow, 1930); “In farvaltung fun der sektsye tsu derlernen di revolutsyonere bavegung bay yidn” (On the management of the section to teach about the revolutionary movement among the Jews), in ibid.