YANKEV YOSADE (JOKŪBAS JOSADĖ)

YANKEV YOSADE (JOKŪBAS JOSADĖ) (August 15, 1911-November 9, 1995)

            He was born in Kalvarye (Kalvarija), Lithuania.  His father owned a small textile factory.  He attended in a Hebrew high school in Marianpol, and in 1931 graduated from a progressive Yiddishist high school in Vilkomir (Ukmergė).  He went on to studied humanities at Kovno University.  Until WWII he was active in leftist Jewish circles in Kovno.  When the Bolsheviks later occupied Lithuania, he became an active contributor to their institutions.  When the Germans entered Kovno, he escaped into Russia, served in the Red Army for three years, and was later in Inner Asia.  He debuted in print with stories in Folksblat (People’s newspaper) in Kovno (1930) and later contributed to: the Kovno anthology Glokn (Bells), Oyfgang (Arise) of 1933, Brikn (Bridges) of 1937, Zamlbukh far literatur (Collection for literature), and Bleter (Leaves) of 1938, among others.  He served on the editorial boards of the journals Shtraln (Beams [of light]) and Kovner emes (Kovno truth).  He was also a contributor, 1940-1941, to Shtern (Star) and Emes in Vilna.  He placed work as well in Eynikeyt (Unity) in Moscow and elsewhere.  His three-act play Itsik vitenberg (Itsik Vitenberg) about the first commander of the Jewish fighting organization in the Vilna ghetto, which he prepared for the publisher in 1947, was never published because of the liquidation of Yiddish culture in Russia.  In the 1980s he reworked the original version of this play thoroughly and published it in Sovetish heymalnd (Soviet homeland) (Moscow) 8 (1989).  After WWII he began to write in Lithuanian (criticism, stories, and plays).  He was living in Vilna from 1958.

Sources: Shtraln (Kovno) 20 (1941); H. Osh(erovitsh), in Eynikeyt (Moscow) (July 3, 1945); A. Kushnirov, in Naye prese (Paris) (July 27, 1945); N. Y. Gotlib, in Keneder odler (Montreal) (April 10, 1944); Gotlib, in the anthology Lite (Lithuania), vol. 1 (New York, 1951), p. 1106.

Khayim Leyb Fuks

[Additional information from: Berl Kagan, comp., Leksikon fun yidish-shraybers (Biographical dictionary of Yiddish writers) (New York, 1986), col. 295; 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), pp. 174-75.]