Meir Viner

Meir Viner (Weiner) was born in Kraków, lived in Vienna, and studied in Basel and Zurich. In his younger adult years, Viner was committed to Jewish mysticism and Zionism. In 1925, he joined the Austrian Communist Party and settled in the Soviet Union a year later. There he worked in Kharkov, Kiev (as the head of literature and folklore studies in the Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture), and Moscow (as the head of the Department of Yiddish Language and Literature at the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute). Viner was killed in action in World War II while serving in the Moscow Writers Battalion. In addition to his works of literary criticism, he wrote poetry and novels.