Doiv Ber Levin

Born into a religious family in the town of Liadi, a center of the Chabad Hasidic movement, Doiv Ber Levin was a Russian-language writer of experimental prose and children’s fiction, often on Jewish themes. A self-taught speaker of Russian, Levin was educated at the State Institute of Art History in Petrograd. He was also an active participant in the avant-garde group OBERIU as the collective’s only writer of “pure prose.” Levin spent much of the 1930s writing children’s literature, which described the rapidly changing circumstances of Jewish life in the Soviet shtetl. Drafted into the Red Army during World War II, he was killed on the Leningrad front. While all of his manuscripts and personal archives were thought to be lost during the Siege of Leningrad, Levin has received renewed attention in recent years in Russia, where several of his works have been republished.