Moyshe Litvakov

Born in Cherkassy in the Russian Empire (today in Ukraine) to a poor and religious family, Moyshe Litvakov received a traditional Jewish education but turned to modern education, taking a gymnasium certificate and studying at the Sorbonne. In 1905, Litvakov returned to Russia to cofound the short-lived Zionist Socialist Workers Party, which combined territorialist ideas with a focus on pursuit of Jewish autonomy and national awakening in the diaspora and revolutionary socialist activism. After the failure of the 1905 Revolution, Litvakov contributed literary criticism under the pseudonym M. Lirov to the Russian daily Kievskaia mysl’ while deepening his commitment to a radical vision of secular Yiddish cultural revolution; in 1911, he cofounded the pioneering Yiddish secular elementary school in Kiev’s Demievka neighborhood with Mikhl Levitan. In 1917, Litvakov emerged as one of the most sophisticated theorists of a new revolutionary Yiddish culture that would not crudely break with previous Jewish cultural forms but rather dialectically incorporate them while also regrounding itself as a cosmopolitan and world literature through a massive program of translation. Active in Kiev’s burgeoning Yiddishist cultural milieu as a critic, essayist, and publisher, Litvakov embraced the Bolshevik regime in 1919 and adopted an uncompromisingly aggressive stance against any form of Jewish culture he deemed reactionary, including in that purview Kiev’s Yiddishist Kultur-Lige in which he had hitherto been active. In the Soviet Union, Litvakov became a leading authority in the Yiddish cultural sphere as editor of the chief newspaper of the Jewish Section of the Communist Party Der emes. Mercilessly criticizing Yiddish literature he deemed insufficiently revolutionary, he himself was killed in the Bolshevik regime’s bloody purges in 1937.