HERSHL DUBINSKY

HERSHL DUBINSKY (1915-1941)

            He was a poet who lived in Kiev. He began publishing poetry in Yiddish newspapers and journals in Ukraine. The poems were naïvely self-confident, as was true of the work of many young poets who grew up in an atmosphere of paeans to the rulers in the land of the Communist Party and the “great leader” Stalin. In 1939 he published his first and only volume of poetry; he was preparing another, but it never saw the light of day. The war broke out, the twenty-six-year-old poet volunteered for service in the army, he took part in the battles to defend his hometown of Kiev, and there he died.

            His work included: Mut un libshaft (Courage and love), poetry (Kiev: State Publishers for National Minorities, 1939), 109 pp.; “Alts vet ersht zayn” (Everything will be first), a cycle of poems in the collection Lire (Lyre) (Moscow: Sovetski pisatel, 1985).

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. 98.