DIMITRYUK BYADULYE

DIMITRYUK BYADULYE (1886-1941)

This was the literary name of Shmuel-Nokhum Plavnik.  He was born in Posotsk, near Radoshkovich in Minsk Province.  He attended religious elementary school and a yeshiva.  He worked as an employee in a forest and took part in the revolutionary movement of 1905.  He began his literary career with descriptions, in Hebrew and in Yiddish, of the harsh life of forest workers.  He later switched to White Russian.  He wrote poems, stories, and critiques.  Under the Soviet regime, he became a White Russian writer.  He wrote a great deal about Jewish life.  He translated into White Russian the writings of Peretz and Sholem-aleykhem.  Together with N. Rubinshteyn, he compiled a Yidish-vaysrusisher tashn-verterbukh (Yiddish-White Russian table dictionary) (Minsk, 1932), 218 pp.  He died in transit with other evacuated writers from White Russia and Ukraine.

Sources: A. Finkl, obituary in Eynikeyt (Moscow) (August 3, 1944); H. Vaynraykh, Blut af der zun (Blood on the sun) (Brooklyn, 1950), p. 2-7.