SHLOYME VERMEL

SHLOYME VERMEL (July 3, 1860-1940)

            He was born in Shklov (Szkłów), Mohilev district, Byelorussia.  He studied in religious elementary school and in high schools in Bobruisk, Mohilev district, and in Moscow.  In 1886 he graduated from the medical faculty of Moscow University.  During the Russo-Japanese War (1904), he served as a military doctor on the Manchurian front.  In WWI he worked in a clinic for the mentally ill in Kazan.  His journalistic activities began in 1882 with the weekly publication Voskhod (Sunrise), and from that point he was a frequent contributor to a variety of Russian Jewish newspapers.  A man with a positive attitude toward Yiddish, he propagandized in the Russian Jewish pedagogical journal Evreiskaia shkola (The Jewish school) in St. Petersburg (1904-1905), which he edited, for the Jewish public school as an instrument of ethnic education.  He published a number of books in Russian, among them a biography of Yitskhok-Ber Levinzon in 1901.  In Yiddish he wrote the pamphlet: A gut vort tsu di eltern un kinder (A good word for parents and children), about elementary education (Vilna, 1904), 23 pp.  He translated from French into Yiddish: Y. M. Pines’s Di geshikhte fun der yidisher literatur (The history of Yiddish literature) (Moscow, 1913), adding several of his own chapters and an introduction on Yiddish and Yiddish literature.  After the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, he withdrew from active Jewish community work and dedicated himself solely to medicine.  Subsequent information about him remains largely unknown.

Source: Zalmen Reyzen, Leksikon, vol. 1.