ARN RASKIN

ARN RASKIN (1910-1986)

            He was a literary scholar and critic, born in Nosovitsh (Nosovychi), Byelorussia.  He graduated from the Jewish pedagogical technical school in Homlye (Homyel’) and later from the Yiddish division for literature and language of the Moscow Pedagogical Institute.  In 1938 he received the title of candidate in philological science after defending his dissertation in the field of Western European literature.  He was mobilized into the Red Army during WWII, and over the years 1945-1949 he served as a translator from German for the Soviet administration in Berlin.  After he demobilization, he worked as a lecturer in the department of foreign literature, 1950-1960, at the Kursk Pedagogical Institute.  He lived in Elektrostal’, a suburb of Moscow.  He began published poetry and sketches in the local Yiddish press in 1928—over the years 1935-1932, the Byelorussian regional, municipal, and factory newspapers would once each week published an entire page in Yiddish.  With the establishment of Sovetish heymland (Soviet homeland), Raskin systematically published in it for two decades literary critical articles on the classic Yiddish writers, on Dovid Bergelson, Leyb Kvitko, Perets Merkish, and others.  In volume 6 of Mendele’s Gezamlte verk (Collected works) (Moscow, 1940), there are “several notations concerning the Hebrew-language texts of Shloyme reb khayims (Shloyme the son of Reb Khayim) in comparison with the Yiddish text.”  After his death, a collection of his research works was published in Israel: Literarishe eseyen (Literary essays) (Jerusalem: Perets Publ., 1989), 269 pp.

Berl Cohen

[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), pp. 355-56.]