ANE
STELMAKH (1900-1950)
Little detailed biographical information
about her is known, except that her real name was R. Eyfe; she was born in a
town in Ukraine and grew up there; and she studied in a Soviet Yiddish school
and in a technical senior high school, was by training an engineer, and worked
in the Kiev Institute for Jewish Culture in the Ukrainian Academy of
Sciences. Before WWII, she wrote prose
tales but nothing was published. In an
autobiographical story entitled “Ikh un barele” (Me and Barele)—she gave
herself the name Anyute here—she wrote: “I recall my childhood—during WWI,
early youth—[and] in the civil war.” It
was probably several years before the year 1914, roughly around the year
1908. Her first literary efforts took
place just before the outbreak of WWII, while working in Kiev. She showed her stories to Dovid Hofshteyn,
and he saw in her a new writing talent. At
the start of the war, she was evacuated to the southern Urals, where she lived
in the city of Novotroitsk, Chalov (now Orenburg) district, where she worked as
a mountain engineer and continued writing.
One of her stories, “A moshl-kaposhl” (A moshl-kaposhl), appeared in the
Moscow newspaper Eynikeyt (Unity) in
1946. On March 30, 1946, the editorial
board announced a competition for a short story. The jury was made up of Dovid Bergelson, Der
Nister, Yekhezkl Dobrushin, Shmuel Halkin, Grigori Zhits, Arn Kushnirov, and
Itzik Fefer. Thirty manuscripts were
submitted. The jury decided (October 11,
1946) not to award a first prize, but to give second prize to Ane Stelmakh for
her story “A gemel af a bekher” (A painting of a goblet); third prize was awarded
to Herts Rivkin for his story “Der tate un der zun” (The father and the
son). On July 9, the editorial board of Eynikeyt arranged a meeting for Ane
Stelmakh with Shloyme Mikhoels, Dovid Hofshteyn, and other prominent Yiddish
writers and cultural leaders. Only a few
months later in 1947, Emes Publishers in Moscow brought out her only book, Af dorem-ural (In the southern Urals), 188
pp., which included seven stories: “A moshl-kaposhl,” “Ikh un barele,” “Dem
zeydns kinder” (Grandfather’s children), “A gemel af a bekher,” “Der
hundertster meridyon” (The hundredth meridian), “A mayse mit a farneyt harts”
(A story with a sown up heart), and “Der bashteler fun ashtshe-butak” (The
order from Ashchibutak). She had many
more and prepared another series of stories (we know this from a latter she
penned to Y. Dobrushin and A. Kushnirov, published in Sovetish heymland [Soviet homeland] 10 [1976]). “Her language is rich and juicy and cautious,”
wrote Meylekh Ravitsh, “and in a manner of telling a story she strives to
imitate Dovid Bergelson, at times even more like Itsik Kipnis’s way of
recounting a tale, mainly in placing greater emphasis in the humorous element. She describes the wildness of nature well and
in a living sensibility,…and these depictions were something new in Yiddish—not
Mendele, notr Asch, nor even Bergelson painted the southern Urals…. A book with new people, new regions, and a new
talented writer.” Little is known of her
fate in the years of the liquidation of Soviet Yiddish culture. She was arrested in 1948 and murdered in
1950.
Sources:
“Bashlus fun juri” (The jury’s decision), Eynikeyt
(Moscow) (October 24, 1946); “Bergelson mit a. stelmakh” (Bergelson and A.
Stelmakh); Sh. Mikhoels, in Eynikeyt
(July 12, 1947); Rivke Rubin, in Folks-shtime
(Warsaw) 47 (1947); Rivkin, in Af naye
vegn (On new roads) (New York, 1949); Meylekh Ravitsh, in Fraye arbeter-shtime (New York) (October
29, 1948); Ravitsh, in Yorbukh (New
York) (1948/1949); Ravitsh, in Tsukunft
(New York) (October 1949); N. Mayzil, in Morgn-frayhayt
(New York) (April 25, 1948); Mayzil, in Yidishe
kultur (New York) (December 1949), pp. 23-30; E. Fershlayser, in Morgn-zhurnal (New York) (December 5,
1948); N. Y. Gotlib, in Keneder odler
(Montreal) (March 30, 1953); Gotlib, in the anthology Lo amut ki eḥye (I shall not die
but live on) (Merḥavya, 1957), p. 369; Chone Shmeruk, comp., Pirsumim yehudiim babrit-hamoatsot,
1917-1961 (Jewish publications in the Soviet Union, 1917-1961) (Jerusalem,
1961), see index.
Yankev Birnboym
[Additional
information from: Berl Kagan, comp., Leksikon
fun yidish-shraybers (Biographical dictionary of Yiddish writers) (New
York, 1986), col. 404; 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. 261-62.]
No comments:
Post a Comment