KHANAN DZHEVYETSKI

KHANAN DZHEVYETSKI (1908-June 18, 1942)

            He was born in Lodz, Poland.  He received a Jewish and a general education.  He graduated from Polish Hebrew humanistic high school in Lodz.  He worked as a private teacher of Hebrew until 1939.  He began writing stories in Hebrew as early as his school years, later in Yiddish and in Polish.  He published a number of chapters of a novel, entitled “Yaush” (Despair), in Davar (Word) in Tel Aviv (1936), as well as a number of stories which depict the situation of Jewish intellectuals in Poland on the eve of the Holocaust.  He published in Lodzher tageblat (Lodz daily newspaper) and Nayer folksblat (New people’s newspaper) in Lodz over the years 1928 to 1930; in Baderekh (On the road) in Warsaw; and in Republika (Republic) in Polish in Lodz.  In 1938 he published a portion of a novel, entitled “Kadima” (Onwards), in the Hebrew-language anthology Teḥumim (Boundaries) (Lodz), which he edited together with Malkiel Lusternik.  I was a Yiddish teacher in a school in the Lodz ghetto and wrote a great deal.  He composed a novel in Yiddish in the Lodz ghetto, Baginen (Dawn), and a long story in Hebrew, “Peḥam magia al hataḥana” (Coal comes to the station), in which he portrayed Jewish life in the ghetto.  He died of hunger in the Lodz ghetto.

Sources: V. Karmyel, in Kultur un dertsiung (New York) (January 1948); Idisher kemfer (New York) (July 21, 1950); Kh. L. Fuks, in Fun noentn over 3 (New York, 1957).