MOYSHE DUBILET

MOYSHE DUBILET (1897- September 18, 1941)

            He was a literary critic and teacher, born in the town of Dmitrovke (Dmytrivka), Ukraine, into a poor family. In his youth he came to Odessa, where he studied in teachers’ training courses and simultaneously worked as a private tutor. During the civil war, he served in the Red Army. After demobilization he returned to Odessa and graduated from the Jewish division of the Pedagogical Institute for People’s Education. Over the course of a number of years, he worked as a teacher of language and literature and was a methodologist in Odessa Jewish schools. In the latter half of the 1920s, he published in the Yiddish press articles on methods of teaching Yiddish literature. From1933 he was a researcher in the Kiev Institute for Jewish Culture at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, and from 1938 to 1941 he was a senior scholarly worker at the same institute then known as the “cabinet.” Over the course of the 1930s, he published in newspapers and journals articles on the Yiddish classics and on the creative work of Soviet Yiddish writers. In 1941 he went with the army to the war front, and there he fell in the fighting on September 18, 1941.

            His work included: Literarishe khrestomatye farn 8tn klas fun der mitlshul (Literature reader for the eighth class of middle school) (Kharkov-Kiev: State Publishers for National Minorities, 1940), 171 pp.

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. 97-98.