Old Women

The Yiddish poet, playwright, and essayist Peretz Markish was born in poverty in the town of Polonnye (now in Ukraine). The leading expressionist poet of his generation, Markish became the voice of the revolution during his time in Poland in the 1920s. He spent much of the interwar period in Warsaw, where he was a member of Di Khalyastre (The Gang), a prominent group of Yiddish literati, and co-founded the journal Literarishe bleter (Literary Pages). During this period, he wrote a great deal of poetry about the pogroms that accompanied the Russian Revolution and Civil War, including his haunting cycle, “The Mound,” in which a heap of murdered Jewish corpses speaks, in gruesome detail. Markish later became one of the most decorated and significant members of the Soviet Yiddish intelligentsia and was a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during World War II. Markish was murdered on August 12, 1952, by the very state he had supported, alongside other Soviet Yiddish writers. His poetry was widely translated into Russian after his official, posthumous rehabilitation in 1955.