GENNADY
ESTRAIKH (b. 1952)
He was born in the city of
Zaporozhye (Zaporiz’ke), Ukraine, into a family of formers residents of the Nay-Zlatopol
Jewish national district. He gained his
education in hometown, became an engineer, worked in Zaporiz’ke and later in
Moscow, and he was active in the 1980s in various Jewish community
organizations. Over the years 1988-1991,
he worked as secretary of the journal Sovetish
heymland (Soviet homeland). He
published his first stories in this journal in 1986. From that time forward, he published stories
and articles. From 1991 he was at Oxford
University. In 1996 he defended a
doctoral dissertation on Soviet Yiddish.
In 1994 he initiated the literary journal Di pen (The pen) and edited all fifty-five issues which appeared
between 1994 and 1998. He worked as a
lecturer in Oxford and London. From 1999
he was European correspondent for the Forverts
(Forward)—a few articles he signed Yankev London and G. Yakobi. All through this time he was carrying on active
research work, teaching, and appearing at academic seminars in various
countries. Since 2003 he has been the
author of literary research and professor of Yiddish studies at New York
University. His writings include: “Di
royte balke” (The red rafter), a story, supplement to Sovetish heymland (1988); Kurtser
yidish-rusissher verterbukh (Short Yiddish-Russian dictionary) (Moscow,
1989), second improved edition (1990); Moskver
purim-shpiln (Purim plays in Moscow), stories (Oxford, 1993), 151 pp.; Soviet Yiddish: Language Planning and
Linguistic Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 217 pp.; Intensive Yiddish (Oxford, 1996), 255
pp.; In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance
with Communism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005), 242 pp.; Yiddish in the Cold War (Oxford, 2008),
178 pp.; Yiddish in Weimar Berlin : At
the Crossroads of Diaspora Politics and Culture (London: Taylor and
Francis, 2017); The Shtetl: Image and
Reality (London: Taylor and France, 2017); Translating Sholem Aleichem: History, Politics and Art (London:
Routledge, 2017).
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. 272-73.
No comments:
Post a Comment