MEYER BRUKAZH

MEYER BRUKAZH (1903-1977)

            A journalist, he was born in the town of Garvalan (Garwolin), Poland. He worked as a laborer in a print shop and also took up tailoring. In 1923 he moved to the Soviet Union and studied in a Party school (1924-1926) and later in the Moscow Pedagogical Institute. In the latter half of the 1930s, he was living in Birobidzhan, a teacher of Yiddish language and literature in a pedagogical technicum. For many years he was involved in journalism, publishing essays on Yiddish and Russian writers and artists in newspapers and journals: Alexander Herzen, Anton Chekhov, Maxim Gorky, Isaac Babel, Mikhail Svetlov, Emanuel Kazakevitsh, and Zair Azgur, among others. In the last years of his life, living in Vitebsk, he wrote up a series of reportage pieces and essays concerning this city and its people. Several of them were published in Sovetish heymland (Soviet homeland).

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), p. 61.