YANKEV LVOVSKI

YANKEV LVOVSKI (1888-1972)

            A literary critic, he was born in the town of Volotshisk (Volochys'k), Ukraine. He left home while still young and wandered over various cities, taking up his own education. He later worked as a teacher in Berdichev and Kiev and after that in the Jewish Colonization Association (YEKO). His wanderings during WWI brought him to Moscow, where he became a plenipotentiary of the Moscow society to assist Jews who were suffering during the war. After the Revolution, he worked in Nizhny Novgorod, before returning to Moscow and working in the Jewish educational institutions as an inspector and teacher. He devoted the last decades of his life entirely to literary work, publishing in the journal Sovetish heymland (Soviet homeland) articles and memoirs of encounters with Jewish writers, among them: Der Nister, with whom he had been a friend for many years, as well as reviews of newly published Yiddish books. He left behind in manuscript fragments of an unfinished biographical novel entitled Der nister.

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. 205.