SHLOYME SHEYNKER

SHLOYME SHEYNKER (1903-1954)

            He was a poet, born in the Jewish colony of Yefingar (now, Plyushchivka), Ukraine, into a family of an agricultural laborer. In 1917 he began to work as a shepherd among the local peasants. Over the years 1918-1928, he was a cobbler in the colony and in Nikolaev. He studied (1929-1931) in a school for administrative and Party workers in Odessa, and upon graduation he became a manager of a Party school in Nikolaev. He worked on the editorial board (1933-1934) of the newspaper Odeser arbeter (Odessa worker), and when the paper was discontinued, he moved to Kalinindorf (center of the first Jewish ethnic region), where he worked in the political section of the machine-tractor station. From 1935 until 1941, he was editor of the Kalinindorf regional newspaper, Kolvirt emes (Collective farm truth). At the beginning of the war, he left for the front, was demobilized in 1945 as an invalid, and worked for a certain time as an instructor for the Kalinindorf district Party committee. He debuted in print in the late 1920s, publishing poems in the journals Prolit (Proletarian literature) and Di royte velt (The red world) in Kharkov, and the newspapers Odeser arbeter, Der shtern (The star), and Der emes (The truth). Several of them were included in the collective volumes: Deklamater fun der sovetisher yidisher literatur (Declaimer of Soviet Yiddish literature) (Moscow: Emes, 1934); and Shlakhtn (Battles) (Kharkov-Kiev: Ukrainian State Publishers for National Minorities, 1932) which was dedicated to the fifteenth anniversary of the October Revolution.

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. 386-87.