MOYSHE
MAYDANSKI (1900-1973)
He was born in the town of Polonne,
Ukraine, where he received a traditional Jewish upbringing and education. He was a Soviet Yiddish linguist, who served
as a scholarly contributor at the Office of Yiddish Culture in the Ukrainian
Academy of Sciences in Kiev in the late 1920s. He researched Yiddish language and literature,
and he worked on school curricula in the 1920s and 1930s. He also wrote a series of articles (see
examples below) concerned with translation: Taras Shevchenko’s Ukrainian poetry
into Yiddish and Sholem Aleichem’s writings into Russian and Ukrainian. He published his writings in scholarly
anthologies, journals, newspapers, and books, such as: “Der novi” (The
prophet), in the collection Yortsayt fun
taras shevtshenko (Anniversary of the death of Taras Shevchenko) (Kiev,
1920); with L. Prusman, Lenins ruf
(Lenin’s call), “textbook for illiteracy liquidation posts” (Kiev: Kultur-lige,
1925), 76 pp.; Lenins ruf, lernbukh far
veynik-ivredike (Lenin’s call, a textbook for the nearly illiterate), part
2, “by a group of teachers, including Zingerman, Safyan, Faynerman, Kruglyak,
and Ravinski, edited by Y. Kantor and M. Maydanski” (Kiev, 1926), 223 pp.,
second edition (1928), 120 pp., third edition (1929), 128 pp.; “Problemen fun
shprakh-unterrikht in shtifs arbetn” (Problems in language instruction in
Shtif’s works), Afn shprakhfront (On
the language front) (Kiev) 2 (1935), pp. 39-69; “Vegn di lernbikher af shprakh”
(On the language textbooks), Afn
shprakhfront 4-3 (1935), pp. 230-48; with M. Shapiro, Alef-beyz far dervaksene (The alphabet for adults) (Kharkov-Kiev,
1933), 58 + 2 pp.; Ortografye un
punktuatsye (Orthography and punctuation), “collection of rules and
exercises, auxiliary text for middle school” (Kiev, 1936), 159 pp. (several
editions appeared, the fifth in 1941, 144 pp.); with Khayim Loytsker and M.
Shapiro, Leyenbukh far yidishe shuln
(Textbook for Jewish schools) (Kiev-Kharkov, 1936), 68 pp.; “Vegn dem epitet
bay sholem-aleykhemen” (On the epithets used by Sholem Aleichem), pp. 67-80,
and “T. g. shevtshenkos dikhtung in yidish” (T. G. Shevchenko’s poetry in
Yiddish), pp. 163-206, in Afn
shprakhfront 4 (1939). During WWII
Maydanski was not mobilized into the army because of his age, and he continued
his work in the office in which, from 1932, he led the seminar on Yiddish at
the Institute of Ukrainian Linguistics.
In 1942 he worked on a dissertation entitled “Problemen fun yidishn
sintaks” (Problems in Yiddish syntax) and, together with Kh. Loytsker and Elye
Spivak, on a work entitled “Etyudn vegn der yidisher literarisher shprakh, vegn
ir geshikhte un haynttsaytikn tsushand” (Studies concerning the Yiddish
literary language, on its history and contemporary state). He held the title “candidate in philological
science.” In 1943 he prepared a piece:
“Der sintaks fun eynfakhn zats” (The syntax of a simple sentence). At the beginning of 1945, Maydanski and the
Soviet Jewish folklorist Moyshe Beregovski traveled around the western regions
of Ukraine, collecting new Yiddish folkloric materials concerned with WWII, and
later they went to the cities and towns of Bukovina to collect folklore
material from the Jewish ghettos of Transnistria and to attend a writers’
conference in Czernowitz. He
demonstrated there materials collected on phonograph albums. Together with M. Shapiro, Kh. Loytsker, and
R. Lerner, in 1946 he prepared for publication a major Russian-Yiddish
dictionary. He helped in compiling the
history of the Holocaust, especially the Jewish tragedy in Kiev (Babi Yar) and
the Kiev region. He contributed to a
book on the Jewish partisans. He also
wrote a work on “the Russian and Ukrainian translations of Sholem
Aleichem.” There was no news concerning
his fate during and after the murder of Yiddish writers (1948-1952), but he
went on to publish a series of works in Sovetish
heymland (Soviet homeland).
Sources:
Biblyografishe yorbikher fun yivo
(Bibliographic yearbooks from YIVO), vol. 1 (Warsaw, 1928); Dos yidishe bukh in f.s.r.r. (The
Yiddish in the Soviet Union), for the years 1917-1921 (Kiev, 1930); N.
Rubinshteyn, Dos yidishe bukh in
sovetnfarband in 1933 un 1935 (The Yiddish book in the Soviet Union in 1933
and 1935), (Minsk, 1935); Yudel Mark, in Yivo-bleter
(New York) 16.2 (1940), pp. 157-60; A. Kahan, in Eynikeyt (Moscow) (April 5, 1943); Emkin, in Eynikeyt (March 3, 1945); P. Novik, Eyrope tsvishn milkhome un sholem (Europe between war and peace)
(New York, 1948), p. 269; N. Mayzil, Dos
yidishe shafn un der yidisher shrayber in sovetn-farband (Jewish creation
and the Jewish writer in the Soviet Union) (New York, 1959), p. 130; Anon., “In
cabinet far yidisher kultur” (In the office of Yiddish culture), Eynikeyt (July 15, 1942; January 4, 1945);
Anon., “A groyser oyftu in antviklen di yidishe kultur un visnshaft” (A great
accomplishment in developing Yiddish culture and scholarship), Eynikeyt (April 2, 1946); the cultural
chronicle in the anthology of Afn
shprakhfront (Kiev) and Tsukunft
(New York) (April 1945); Sovetishe
biblyografye (Soviet bibliography) in the YIVO archives.
Zaynvl Diamant
[Additional
information from: 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. 238.]
No comments:
Post a Comment