SONYE TUTSHINSKI

SONYE TUTSHINSKI (1902-1987)

            She was born in Bohuslav, Kharkov district, Ukraine.  Until age ten she studied in a religious elementary school for girls.  At age twelve she lost her father, left home, moved to Kiev, and became a laborer in a weaving plant.  During the revolution of 1917-1918, she was active in the trade union and political movement in Kharkov.  From early 1920 she was living in Kharkov.  In 1921 she began publishing correspondence and reportage pieces on workers’ lives, and after 1925 she published poetry as well in: Emes (Truth) in Moscow; Shtern (Star) and Di royte velt (The red world) in Kharkov; and Oktyabr (October) in Minsk; among others.  He authored: Veretenes (Spindles) (Kharkov-Kiev: Ukrainian state publishers for national minorities, 1934), 79 pp.  The main themes of her work involved labor and love.  WWII interrupted his life and work; she was confined in Transnistria.  Afterward she settled in Koziatyn, Ukraine, where lived under harsh conditions—she wrote nothing further.

Sources: Royte velt (Kharkov) 3 (1925); Ezra Korman, Yidishe dikhterins (Jewish women poets) (Chicago, 1928), pp. 315-18, 343; N. Mayzil, Dos yidishe shafn un der yidisher shrayber in sovetnfarband (Jewish creation and the Yiddish writer in the Soviet Union) (New York, 1959), p. 128.

Khayim Leyb Fuks

[Additional information from: Berl Kagan, comp., Leksikon fun yidish-shraybers (Biographical dictionary of Yiddish writers) (New York, 1986), col. 279; and 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. 162.]