Abram Efros

Born in Moscow and educated at Moscow University’s faculty of law, Abram Efros was a translator, poet, art historian, and critic. After 1917, he served on the commission for the protection of artistic and antique treasures in the Russian Soviet Republic, and on the boards of the Tretyakov Gallery, other art museums and installations, and the GOSET (Moscow State Jewish Theater). He edited art and literary journals and taught art and theater history, as well as museum studies, at universities in the Soviet Union. Efros translated the Song of Songs and other Hebrew biblical texts into Russian, as well as Petrarch, Dante, Michelangelo, and others. In the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s, Efros was arrested and exiled, and in the late 1940s he was ousted from his academic posts.