Itzik Feffer

Itzik Feffer (10 September 1900 – 12 August 1952), also Fefer (Yiddish איציק פֿעפֿער, Russian Ицик Фефер, Исаàк Соломòнович Фèфер) was a Soviet Yiddish poet executed on the Night of the Murdered Poets during Joseph Stalin's purges.

Early life

Itzik Feffer was born in Shpola, a town in Zvenigorod ''uyezd'' (district) of Kiev Governorate, in what was then part of the Russian Empire and is now part of Ukraine.

Career

World War II

During the Second World War, he was a military reporter with the rank of colonel and was vice chairman of the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC). He and Solomon Mikhoels travelled to the United States in 1943 in a well-documented fund-raising trip.

Arrest and death

In 1948, after the assassination of the JAC Chairman Solomon Mikhoels, Feffer, along with other JAC members, was arrested and accused of treason. Feffer had been an informer for the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB) since 1943. Feffer reportedly cooperated with the investigation, providing false information that would lead to the arrest and indictment of over a hundred people, but at the trial, he made openly nationalistic statements and expressed pride in his Jewish identity. Feffer had also allegedly been one of the "most loyal and conformist Yiddish poets", who had helped to enforce strict ideological control over other Yiddish writers, and had a history of denouncing colleagues for their "nationalistic hysteria". However, in 1952, Feffer, along with other defendants, was tried at a closed trial of JAC members, ostensibly due to their American-backed proposal to establish Jewish autonomy in Crimea, and executed on 12 August 1952, at the Lubyanka Building.

Feffer was rehabilitated posthumously in 1955, after Stalin's death.

Paul Robeson

The American concert singer and actor Paul Robeson met Feffer on 8 July 1943, in New York during a Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee event chaired by Albert Einstein, one of the largest pro-Soviet rallies ever held in the United States. After the rally, Paul Robeson and his wife Eslanda Robeson, befriended Feffer and Mikhoels.

Six years later, in June 1949, during the 150th-anniversary celebration of the birth of Alexander Pushkin, Robeson visited the Soviet Union to sing in concert. According to David Horowitz

During his concert in Tchaikovsky Hall on 14 June - which was broadcast across the entire country - Robeson publicly paid tribute to Feffer and the late Mikhoels, singing the Vilna Partisan song "Zog Nit Keynmol" in both Russian and Yiddish. Recordings of the concert survived, but Robeson's spoken words are lost. Robeson's son, Paul Robeson Jr., tells about this episode of his father's biography in the documentary film ''His Name was Robeson'' (1998) by Nikolay Milovidov.

Literary work

Feffer was a prolific poet who wrote almost exclusively in Yiddish, and his poems were widely translated into Russian and Ukrainian. He is considered one of the greatest Soviet poets in the Yiddish language and his poems were widely admired inside and outside Russia.

Di Shotns fun Varshever Geto

His epic poem ("The Shadows of the Warsaw Ghetto" is a tribute to the 750 Jews who rebelled against the Nazi liquidation of the ghetto and gave their lives fighting tyranny during World War II.

Books of poetry

* (Splinters), 1922;
* (About Me and Others Like Me), 1924;
* (A Stone to a Stone), 1925;
* (Simple Words), 1925;
* (Blossoming Garbage), 1926, a paradoxical title about the revival of a ''shtetl'' in Soviet times;
* (Found Sparkles), 1928;
* (Competition), 1930;
* (Posters in Bronze), 1932;
* (Force), 1937;
* 1943;
* (Anew), 1948.

References

Further reading

* Rappaport, Louis. ''Stalin's War Against the Jews: The Doctors Plot & The Soviet Solution'' (Free Press: 1990)
* Stewart, Jeffrey C. (editor). ''Paul Robeson: Artist and Citizen''. Hardcover (Rutgers Univ Pr, April 1, 1998) , Paperback (Rutgers Univ Pr, April 1, 1998)
* Duberman, Martin. Paul Robeson: A Biography, (New Press; Reissue edition (May 1, 1995). .

External links

Itzik Fefer books and audio recordings
in the Yiddish Book Center digital library (in Yiddish)
*https://web.archive.org/web/20060523070618/http://www.midstreamthf.com/200207/feature.html
* http://lib.ru/PROZA/LEWASHOW/mihoels.txt A novel in Russian detailing Mihoels and Feffer's trip to the U.S. and other countries during World War II and Mihoels' subsequent murder.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Feffer, Itzik
1900 births
1952 deaths
People from Shpola
Ukrainian Jews
Communist Party of the Soviet Union members
Yiddish-language poets
Soviet poets
Russian male poets
Soviet male writers
20th-century male writers
Executed writers
Antisemitism in Russia
Jews executed by the Soviet Union
Executed Soviet people from Ukraine
Soviet show trials
Soviet rehabilitations
Jewish anti-fascists
Ukrainian anti-fascists