MIRYEM AYZENSHTADT (ZHELEZNIKOVA)

 MIRYEM AYZENSHTADT (ZHELEZNIKOVA) (1909-1950)

            She was a journalist and literary critic, born in Kiev, Ukraine, into a family of an office employee. She graduated in 1932 from the Leningrad Institute of Philosophy and Literature. From 1934 she was living in Moscow. In the prewar years, she was a correspondent for Literaturnaya gazeta (Literary gazette) and worked for the newspaper Komsomol’skaya pravda (Communist youth truth). From early 1942, she was a member of the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee as well as a contributor to the newspaper Eynikeyt (Unity). She mostly wrote sketches concerning Jews who took part in WWII. Over the course of several years, Eynikeyt published her stories about war heroes, and other Yiddish newspapers around the world would reprinted these materials. A series of her stories were included in the Shvarts bukh (Black book). When in 1946 the Yiddish writer Ben-Tsien Goldberg came to the Soviet Union from New York, she met with him on several occasions. That was the pretext for her arrest on April 4, 1950 in connection with the “case of the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee” (in the investigative materials and at the subsequent court trial, Goldberg was declared to be an “American spy”). The “investigators” horrifically tortured her, and she “admitted” all of the “espionage crimes.” Following the sentence of the court, she was shot. She was rehabilitated on December 28, 1955.

            Her writings include: a volume of documentary stories of Jews—engineers, representative of the technical intellectuals (with the Yiddish writer Shmuel Persov) who were destroyed in the publishing house of the Yiddish publisher Der emes (The truth), just after the shutting down of the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee.

Source: 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. 17-18.