YANKEV LISKOVITS

YANKEV LISKOVITS (b. February 17, 1884)

            He was born in Haysin (Haysyn), Mohilev (Mogilev) district, Byelorussia.  He attended religious primary school, and acquired his secular education with student-Bundists who attracted him to the Bund.  At age fourteen he became a typesetter for an illegal published house.  In 1903 he helped organize the Jewish self-defense in Homel (Gomel).  After the Homel pogrom, he became a fierce Zionist and in 1904, as a pioneer, made aliya to Israel, and worked with “PIASH” (Proceedings of the Israel Academy of. Sciences and Humanities), but he suffered from malaria and had to leave the country.  In 1906 he moved to Cairo, Egypt, where in 1907 he received a position in a religious publishing house.  He was the editor-publisher of the hectographically-produced Yiddish weekly newspaper Di tsayt (The times) in Cairo (1907-1908), of which twenty-four issues appeared, of an illustrated weekly in Arabic (1909) in Cairo, and of the Hebrew-language weekly Leshana habaa beyerushalayim (Next year in Jerusalem) in Cairo (1910).  Over the course of thirty years, he was president of the Jewish cultural community in Cairo, and in recognition of his accomplishments a street was named after him.  After the 1948 invasion of the Arab countries into Israel, he departed from Egypt, where he had lived for over forty years.  He spent 1955-1956 traveling in the United States.  In the 1940s and 1950s, he contributed work to Der amerikaner (The American) in New York, which published his novels: Di farshleyerte velt (The veiled world) of 1950 and Farkholemte oygn (Dreamy eyes) of 1954.  In these novels he describes the life of the Arab effendis and the enslavement of the Arab woman.  He also wrote for Keneder odler (Canadian eagle) in Montreal.  He was last living in Ramat-Gan.

Source: Sh. Izban, in Der amerikaner (New York) (February 18, 1955); Sh. Ernst, in Keneder odler (Montreal) (June 5, 1959).

Benyomen Elis