SAMUYIL (SHMUEL) EYDLIN

SAMUYIL (SHMUEL) EYDLIN (1914-1986)

            He was poet, born in a Ukrainian shtetl, and in the years of WWI, he moved with his family to Kharkov. He studied there in school, later in an institute from which he did not graduate before going to work. While still in school, he wrote poetry, initially in Russian and later in Yiddish. In the latter half of the 1920s and first half of the 1930s, he placed his work in the Kharkov newspapers: Zay greyt (Be ready!) and Der shtern (The star); later in various journals as well. He was invited to join the editorial board of the newspaper Yunge gvardye (Young guard), where he worked until 1936 at which point the newspaper was shut down. At the beginning of WWII, he volunteered to go to the front. During the war, he began writing in Russian, and his poems appeared in the divisional and army newspapers.

            At the end of 1945, he settled in the city of Kuibyshev (Samara); he worked there editing the local Russian newspaper, composing poetry in Russian, and bring out several collections of his poems. He contributed to the anthology Litkomyug (Literary Communist youth) (Kharkov-Kiev, 1933).  He was the author of In der shenster fun medines (In the best of countries), poetry (Kiev: Ukrainian state publishers for national minorities, 1939), 100 pp.

[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. 17.]