YITSKHOK-MEYER SHPILRAYN (May 13, 1891-December 26, 1937)
He was
born in Rostov-on-Don. He graduated as
an external student from high school. He
was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary party (1906-1909), joining the Communist
Party in 1920. Over the years 1909-1912,
he studied philosophy in Heidelberg and Leipzig. He helped found the Yiddish literary
association in Tiflis (1919-1921), later settling in Moscow. In the early 1920s he worked for a short time
in Moscow in the Foreign Ministry. In
1922-1923, he gave the first course on Yiddish in Yiddish at Moscow University,
and he taught there until 1928.
Shpilrayn’s main field was psychological technology. He published works on Yiddish: on Herman
Shtrak’s Yiddish dictionary (in Der Jude
[The Jew] in Berlin 1 [1916]); on the Yiddish dialectological research of Noyekh
Priluski, in Jüdische Rundschau (Jewish
review) 20 (1918); on the
necessity of recording Yiddish folklore, in Emes
(Truth) 205 (1924). He published: Idish, a konspekt fun a kurs in dem tsveytn
moskver melukhishn universitet (Yiddsh, a synopsis of a course in the Second
Moscow State University) (Moscow: Shul un bukh, 1926), 22 pp. He was arrested on February 26, 1935, and he spent
two years of drudgery in prisons and camps.
On December 26, 1937, he was sentenced and the same day shot.
Source: Zalmen Reyzen, Leksikon, vol. 4.
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. 389-90.]
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