A.
VAYTER (AYZIK-MEYER DEVENISHSKI) (July 1878/1879-April 21, 1919)
He was born in Benyakoni (Benakani),
Vilna district, into a family that drew its lineage from rabbis and
scholars. His father, Shmuel Devenishski,
ran s small shop. Unable to handle
children in their home, his parents worried about him, not wanting him to grow
up in the shop, and so they turned him over to his grandfather who ran a mill
close to Benyakoni and had him raise their son.
With itinerant teachers brought in from afar, Vayter studied Hebrew
Bible and Talmud, as well as grammar. At
age twelve he was sent to study to many different towns in Vilna province;
initially, he went to Soletshnik (Šalčininkai) where he studied with the rabbi in the
town, later to Kalelishok where he studied on his own in the synagogue study
hall, and in 1895 he arrived in Smargon (Smarhon, Smorgon) where he studied
secular subject matter in the mornings and all day long Talmud with
commentators, at the same time also reading a great deal of Hebrew and Yiddish
literature. Under the influence of his
friend, the Russian-Polish revolutionary Senitsky, he became acquainted with
the world of European ideas, learned Polish and Russian, and continued reading
books in both languages. It was at that
time that he first attempted to write poetry and scenic images in Hebrew,
Yiddish, and Russian. At age fifteen or
sixteen he even published a handwritten journal in Hebrew and Yiddish, Organ fun di smargoner prushim (Organ of
the Smargon recluses), in the spirit of Arn Liberman’s Haemet (The truth) and the Yontef-bleter
(Holiday sheets) of Y. L. Perets, to whom Vayter had earlier sent his writings
and from whom he had received a short letter of encouragement to continue writing. In Smargon, Vayter for the first time showed
signs of a natural inclination toward the theater. At Purim time, he persuaded his fellows in
the synagogue study hall and other recluses that they should, instead of a
traditional Purim play, stage their own dramatization of Mendele’s Fishke der krume (Fishke the lame),
which made a major impression in the city and aroused much bitterness among the
local pious Jews. In Smargon, Vayter
also approached the revolutionary Jewish labor movement, but when this reached
his parents, they saw to it that he moved to Eishyshok, so that he would be
prevented from abandoning his religious ways.
His mind, however, was no longer focused on Talmud. He soon left Eishyshok for the yeshiva of the
Chofets Chaim in Radun, then on to Kovno where, unbeknownst to his parents, he
began to prepare for his baccalaureate examinations. He did not pass the examination at the time,
and his life then turned in yet another direction.
In Kovno, Vayter joined a
revolutionary socialist circle, members of which included Noyekh Prylucki who was then a teacher in Kovno, Józef Piłsudski who published there Robotnik (The worker), the organ of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS [Polska Partia Socjalistyczna]), and others.
With all his youthful zeal, Vayter took up the study of Marxist
literature, joined the Bund, and with his famous party nom de plume of “Comrade
Aron” (after Arn Liberman), he directed an intensive propagandist and
organizational action, edited (1898) the first issue of Der veker (The
alarm), organ of General Jewish Brush Makers’ Union, and wrote proclamations
for the party. In the late summer of
1899, Vayter was arrested at the Vilna train station with a shipment of illegal
literature. He spent about eight or nine
months in Number 14 Antokol' Prison in Vilna, and he was freed in the early
summer of 1900 under police custody. He
evaded police control and, as an illegal, with fresh zeal he threw himself back
into the revolutionary movement. He was
selected onto the Vilna committee of the Bund, and he contributed to such
illegal Bundist newspapers as Klasnkamf (Class struggle) in Vilna and Minsker
arbeter (Minsk worker), among others.
He directed discussions with the Labor Zionists, as well as with the
Jewish PPS in Vilna. Vayter’s literary
activities of that time period, naturally, were of a purely political
character, but even in this zeal of revolutionary work, Vayter did not overlook
the importance of having an impact on the masses with respect to cultural
education. When this was possible, he
tried to arrange literary evenings or to stage shows for laborers. In this period he staged An-sky’s Di
milkhome far lebn (The war for life) and Gerhart Hauptmann’s Di
veber (The weaver [original: Die Weber]), and tried by himself to
translate theatrical plays from the European repertoire. In late January 1901, he was again arrested
and spent about a year in the Moscow Butyrka Prison—marrying while in
captivity. At the start of 1902 he was
exiled for two years to Siberia—his wife went with him into exile in Siberia,
and later they divorced—and he lived in various villages in the provinces of
Yeniseysk and Krasnoyarsk. He worked for
a time with the railway in Tomsk and wrote correspondence pieces, journalistic
works, and critical articles for Russian newspapers in Siberia. In the spring of 1904, he returned from
exile, spent some time in Zakopane, and from there moved on to Berlin, later
living in Switzerland. Following the
historical events of January 9 [January 22], 1905 [Bloody Sunday], in St.
Petersburg, he returned to Vilna and threw himself once more in revolutionary
work, worked for two months in Lodz primarily among the younger intellectuals,
then came back to Vilna and, using the pseudonym N. Anin, wrote for the liberal
Russian newspaper Severo zapadnoe slovo
(Northwest word). In the October days of
1905, Vayter’s great organizational talents were fully redressed. In those stirring days of the revolution,
Comrade Aron became of his own doing the actual ruler and commander of the city
and was received by all as the unofficial “Governor of Vilna.” In the midst of this turmoil of revolution,
something within him became pried loose.
The wave of pogroms that flooded through the entire Jewish Pale soon
after the first October days broke down his effervescent spirit. Little by little he began to withdraw from
actively working with the Bund, especially after the seventh conference of the
party (April 1906) in Berne. A delegate
to the conference and one of the leaders of the “hardliners” over the question
of reuniting with the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, he now took a
strongly national stand, with inner resentment, and painfully reacted to the
resolution of the majority at the conference to the “softliners” that the Bund
should unite once again with the Russian social democrats. After the conference, Vayter remained for a
time in Lemberg, contributed to the work of the Jewish socialist party in
Galicia (the Galician Bund), and wrote for their organ Sotsyal-demokrat (Social democrat), but more and more he realized
that his true calling was in literature.
At this time he adopted the pen name
of “A. Vayter” which stayed with him in Yiddish literature. He returned to Russia where the police
searched him in connection with his October days in Vilna, and Vayter lived
illegally in various cities in the Pale.
With his new pseudonym, he published the story “In veg” (On the road) in
the Vilna Bundist Folks-tsaytung
(People’s newspaper) 208 (1906), and also published other stories and articles
in other Bundist publications; he co-edited (with Yudin, Zaslavski, and Medem)
the Bundist weekly newspaper Der
morgnshtern (The morning star).
Using the pen name “De,” he reworked a popular scientific pamphlet as Vegn dem 48tn yor in frankraykh (On the 48th
year in France) for the Bundist publisher “Di velt” (The world); in Minsk, he
contributed to the Russian-language press; together with Sore (Sarah) Reyzen,
he translated Max Halbe’s drama In shtrom
(In the current [original: Der Strom])
for a workers’ pageant. His first play—Fartog (Daybreak)—was published in
Vilna; it was a drama in four acts, in blank verse, in which he expressed in
symbolic form the feelings of Jewish intellectuals on the eve of the 1905 Revolution. In early 1908, Vayter together with Shmuel
Niger and Sh. Gorelik founded in Vilna the journal Literarishe monatshriftn (Monthly literary writings). Only four issues of this journal appeared
(February-May 1908)—one cause of this was that the undertaking had no assured
funding; another was the ideological divergence of views among the editors
themselves. Nonetheless, the four issues
that were published remain a portent of cultural renaissance in Yiddish literature. Vayter left afterward for St. Petersburg,
contributing there to Fraynd, and at
that time also writing his second drama, In
fayer (In fire), which yearned for a complete, constructive
Jewishness. In 1911 when there was
founded in Warsaw a society for a serious Yiddish-language theater with Y. L.
Perets at its head, Vayter on a mission for this society visited a series of
cities in northern, western, and southern Russia. In 1912 he published his third theatrical
piece, Der shtumer (The mute), a
semi-symbolist drama which expressed the mood of repentance among Jewish
intellectuals in the post-revolutionary period in Russia (on many occasions
staged in the Yiddish theater). Living
for so many years illegally, always under strained and cautious conditions, in
the end rattled Vayter’s mood and his nerves, such that he decided voluntarily
to turn himself over to the hands of the Tsarist gendarmerie, and in the summer
of 1912 he was exiled for three years to the Turukhansk region of Siberia. He was later granted permission to reside in Krasnoyarsk,
where he contributed to the local Russian newspaper Sibirskaia zhizn' (Siberian
life). After the February Revolution of
1917, Vayter returned to St. Petersburg and threw himself into work for the
revived Jewish community, but after the October Revolution he left there,
remained for a time in Nizhny Novgorod, Minsk, and Bobruisk, and at the end of
1918 he returned to Vilna.
There—together with Shmuel Niger—he brought out Di vokh (The week), a serial dealing with literary and cultural
issues (four issues appeared in print), in which among other things he
published a long story entitled “Baym shaman, a kapitl fun a roman” (With the
shaman, a chapter of a novel) and a one-act play An umglik (An unhappiness) which appears in his collection Ksovim (Writings).
In the winter of 1910, when the Red
Army seized Vilna, Vayter was appointed to manage the great Yiddish publisher
which was organized by the Commissariat for People’s Education in Lithuania and
Byelorussia. In the literary-scholarly
monthly of this Commissariat, Di naye
velt (The new world), which began publishing at this time under the
editorship of Shmuel Niger, Vayter published his last few literary works, among
them chapters from his extraordinary translation of Maxim Gorky’s Mayn kindhayt (My childhood [original: Detstvo]). On
April 19, 1919 the Polish army occupied Vilna.
Drunk with their success, the Polish legionnaires celebrated Polish rule
with one of their most ruthless pogroms against the Jewish population. Vayter was living in Vilna with the family of
Shmuel Niger. In the same house, the
poet Leyb Yofe was living. On April 21,
1919 (the seventh day of Passover) at 10:00 a.m., several wild legionnaires
with an officer in the lead broke into Niger’s apartment, seized Vayter whose
room was just to the left of the entrance, dragged him into the street, and not
far from the home shot him before the eyes of the female artist Sherman who was
wounded at the time. A half hour later
the legionnaires drove Yofe and Niger out into the street and chased them under
a hail of bullets, but they were able to save themselves. For two days Vayter’s corpse lay around in
the gutter near the house where had been living. On the third day when the pogromist terror in
the city quieted down a bit, his remains were buried in the Jewish cemetery in
Vilna. Sh. An-sky wrote on a simple piece
of wood by the grave: “Ayzik Meyer Devenishski (A. Vayter), murdered by a bullet.” Vayter’s tragic death had a huge impact on
the entire Jewish world. A. Vayter-bukh (A. Vayter volume) was
published in Vilna in 1920 (320 pp.) under the editorship of Niger and Zalmen
Reyzen; aside from articles about Vayter’s life and works, it included letters
of his to his friend Mendl Elkin and to others, which are of great biographical
value. His Ksovim appeared in 1923, which was a compilation of a considerable portion
of his fictional and journalistic writings and included an accurate and
valuable biography of Vayter by E. Y. Goldshmidt. In book form, the following works by Vayter
were published: Vegn dem 48tn yor
in frankraykh (Vilna: Di velt, 1907); 56 pp.; Fartog (Vilna: Di velt, 1907), 67 pp., second edition (1911), third
edition (Vilna: B. Kletskin, 1922); In
fayer (Vilna, 1910), 78 pp., second edition (Vilna: Kletskin, 1920), third
edition (Vilna, 1923); Der shtumer, a
play in four acts (Vilna, 1912), 84 pp., second edition (1920); Baym shaman, with a preface by N. Mayzil
(Kiev, 1920), 15 pp.; Ksovim,
compiled by E. Y. Goldshmidt (Vilna: B. Kletskin, 1923), separate pagination
with each section. His translations
include: Mayn kindhayt by Maxim Gorky
(Vilna: B. Kletskin, 1920), 299 pp.
Sources:
Zalmen Reyzen, Leksikon, vol. 1 (with
a bibliography); Z. Zilbertsvayg, Leksikon
fun yidishn teater (Handbook of the Yiddish theater), vol. 1; A. Fridkin,
in Literarishe bleter (Warsaw) (April
19, 1929); A. Morevski, in Tsukunft
(New York) (June 1929); Shmuel Niger,
in Vilna anthology, edited by Y. Yeshurin (New York, 1935), see index;
Niger, in Der tog (New York) (April
24 and May 1, 1949); D. Tsharni (Daniel Charney), A yortsendlik aza,
1914-1924, memuarn (Such a decade, 1914-1924, memoirs) (New York, 1943),
pp. 243-47; Sh. Gorelik, Eseyen
(Essays) (Los Angeles, 1947), pp. 298, 306, 322; Dr. A. Mukdoni, Y. l. perets un dos yidishe teater (Y.
L. Perets and the Yiddish theater) (New York, 1949), see index; M. Elkin, in Der tog (April 16, 1952); Y. Pat, Shmuesn mit
yidishe shrayber (Conversations with
Yiddish writers) (New York, 1954), p. 211; Leo Finkelshteyn, Loshn
yidish un yidisher kiem (The Yiddish language and Jewish survival) (Mexico,
1954), pp. 309-17; M. Turkov, Di letste fun a
groysn dor (The last of a great generation)
(Buenos Aires, 1954), pp. 106-7; D. Eynhorn, in Forverts (New York) (July 8 and November 11, 1956; January 27,
1957); H. Abramovitsh, Farshvundene
geshtaltn (Images gone) (Buenos Aires, 1958), pp. 63-74; Elye Shulman, in Unzer tsayt (New York) (September 1959).
Borekh Tshubinski
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