YASHE RUBYAN

YASHE RUBYAN (1911-November 4, 1979)

            A prose writer, he was born in the town of Yustingrad (Sokolivka), Kiev Province, Ukraine, into the family of a teacher. He was the younger brother of Motl Grubyan. After graduating from a Jewish artisanal school, he moved to Lugansk (Luhans'k) and worked in a factory. In 1931 he began studying at the Odessa laborers’ department and in 1934 at the Odessa Pedagogical Institute. From 1937 until WWII, he worked as a Yiddish teacher in the town of Dzherzhinsk (Romanov). He volunteered and served in the Red Army during WWII. When he was demobilized in the fall of 1945, he settled in Moscow, worked a short time for the book publisher “Der emes” (The truth), and when it was shut down, he went to work in a factory. He published his first story in 1935, but that was followed by a long break in his writing. He returned to literature and emerged as a writer in the 1960s in the columns of Sovetish heymland (Soviet homeland) in Moscow, in which he published short stories, monologues, and humorous sketches. The short story was his genre of choice, though he was a gifted monologist who found his place in postwar Soviet Yiddish literature. He was the author of Nekhtn un haynt, monologn un noveln (Yesterday and today, monologues and novellas) (Moscow: Sovetski pisatel, 1981), 294 pp. He died in Moscow.

Source: Sovetish heymland (Moscow) 1 (1980).

Khayim Maltinski

[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. 357-58.]