YIKHEZKL LIFSHITS

YIKHEZKL LIFSHITS (1883-1950s)

            He was born in the Chernigov (Chernihiv) district, Ukraine.  He graduated as an external student in Odessa, and later studied philology, history, and philosophy at the University of Vienna, where he received an award for his doctoral dissertation on the topic of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and German literature.  He published literary essays in the German monthly Der Kampf (The struggle), edited by Friedrich Adler, as well as articles on Jewish dramatic art in the organ of the Vienna Labor Zionists, Freie Tribüne (Free tribune).  He later himself published in Vienna a small periodical, Jüdisches Theater (Jewish theater)—nine issues appeared in print—and from issue 8 it was the official organ of the “Free Jewish People’s Stage” in Vienna.  He also wrote theater reviews in Yiddish (under the pen name Bimini).  In the early 1920s, he moved to Riga, Latvia, where he was employed as a teacher of history in the Riga city Jewish high school.  He published articles in publications of the Latvian Jewish school organization, primarily in its monthly Naye vegn (New ways) in the years 1927-1929—on school issues, theater, literature, and the like.  He was in Soviet Russia during WWII.  After the war he returned to Riga and died there in the 1950s.

Sources: Zalmen Reyzen, Leksikon, vol. 2; Zalmen Zilbertsvayg, Leksikon fun yidishn teater (Handbook of the Yiddish theater), vol. 2 (New York, 1934); oral information from Y. Kharlash in New York.

Zaynvl Diamant