Night of the murdered poets

In 1956, two Yiddish papers, one in Warsaw and one in New York, gave credible news of the affair for the first time, and in some Jewish circles it gradually became known as “the night of the murdered poets”.

Einer von ihnen,

Peretz Markish was an expressionist poet. He left Russia in the 1920s for Warsaw, where he associated with di khalyastre – the Gang, a group of advanced Yiddish writers – and where he became very widely read, even called “the most popular poet in Poland”. His travels took him to Berlin, Paris, London and Vienna. For a while he stayed in Palestine; but his beloved language was much scorned there by young zealots for whom the Hebrew revival was a central part of the Zionist project. Markish too was drawn back to Russia, where he worked with the State Jewish Theatre…. / TLS 22.8.02

1952 wurde er zusammen mit zahlreichen anderen sowjetischen jüdischen Intellektuellen hingerichtet die meisten wurden am 12. August 1952 erschossen.

Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov, editors:
STALIN’S SECRET POGROM
The postwar inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee
Translated by Laura Esther Wolfson
527pp. Yale University Press. £25