LEYB RASHKIN

LEYB RASHKIN (1903/1904-1942)

            Born Shoyel Fridman in Kuzmir (Kazimierz), Poland, he was the author of stories.  He was the manager of the local Jewish cooperative bank and an iron merchant.  He died during WWII as he was fleeing to the Soviet Union.  He began writing stories in the 1930s.  He was part of the realistic wing in Yiddish prose in Poland between the two world wars.  His only published book, Di mentshn fun godlbozhits (The people of Godlbozhits) (Warsaw: Jewish Universal Library, 1936), 604 pp., describes the shtetl with all of its Jewish social classes and was warmly received by literary critics.  He also published chapters of a novel in Vokhnshrift far literatur un kunst (Weekly writing for literature and art).  “I would designate Rashkin,” noted Y. Y. Trunk, “as a very talented and yet dialectical pen draftsman.  Rashkin knows to go around with the liveliness of the line [but] he lacks the sense of the living precipitousness of color.”

Rashkin with his wife

Sources: Y. Y. Trunk, Di yidishe proze in poyln in der tekufe tsvishn beyde ṿelt milkhomes (Yiddish prose in Poland in the era of the two world wars) (Buenos Aires, 1949), pp. 97-101; Yeshurin archive, YIVO (New York).

Dr. Volf Gliksman