Itzik Feffer

Itzik Feffer (10 September 1900 – 12 August 1952), also Fefer (Yiddish איציק פֿעפֿער, Russian Ицик Фефер, Исаàк Соломòнович Фèфер) was a Soviet Yiddish poet executed on the Night of the Murdered Poets during Joseph Stalin's purges.

Itzik Feffer was born in Shpola, a town in the Zvenigorodka uezd (district) of Kiev Governorate, in what was then part of the Russian Empire and is now part of today's Cherkasy Oblast in Ukraine.

His father was a teacher of Hebrew, as well as a poet, and served as his son's teacher.

He was killed by the Nazis during the occupation of Ukraine in the Second World War.

Feffer started working at a young age as a printer.

In 1917 he joined the Bund and volunteered for the Red Army and fought in Ukraine.

Captured by Anton Denikin's counterintelligence, he ended up in a Kyiv prison, from where he was released by armed workers.

In 1919 he joined the Communist Party and was a member of it until his death.

He edited literary and art magazines in Yiddish and took an active part in the life of writers' organizations in Ukraine and Moscow.

He was a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR and a member of the board of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.

Feffer had also allegedly been one of the "most loyal and conformist Yiddish poets", who had helped to enforce strict ideological control over other Yiddish writers, and had a history of denouncing colleagues for their "nationalistic hysteria".

Feffer was a prolific poet who wrote almost exclusively in Yiddish.

He made his debut in 1919 in the Kyiv newspaper "Komunistishe fon" ("Communist Banner") and was later published in the newspapers "Yugnt", "Nye Zeit", "Folks-Zeitung", "Shtern", "Ukraine", and "Proletarishe fon".

He became one of the leaders of the Kiev literary group "Vidervuks" ("Growth").

His published works in Yiddish take up almost eighty volumes.

He was the most politicized among Jewish poets, devoting most of his poems to the construction of socialism.

In his early poems Feffer praised the revolution and the party.

His poems were quickly published and he earned himself a senior position among Jewish Soviet writers.

He wrote propaganda songs as well as lyrical folk songs, songs of nature, and songs of praise for the Jewish community in Birobidzhan.

He was also engaged in the study of literature, criticism and linguistic innovation, and was also a prolific children's poet.

In April 1942, he became deputy editor of the newspaper Eynikayt («Эйникайт» or "Unity") published by the JAC.

He was also vice chairman of the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and, with Solomon Mikhoels, toured the United States, Mexico, Canada and the United Kingdom in 1943 to win popular support and raise money for the Soviet Union, broadcasting the message that anti-Semitism no longer existed in the Soviet Union.

The American concert singer and actor Paul Robeson had met Feffer on 8 July 1943, in New York during a Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee event chaired by Albert Einstein, one of the largest pro-Soviet rallies ever held in the United States.

After the rally, Paul Robeson and his wife Eslanda Robeson befriended Feffer and Mikhoels.

In February 1944, together with Mikhoels and Shakne Epshtein, he signed a letter to Joseph Stalin with a request to organize an autonomous Jewish region in the Crimea.

Feffer closely collaborated with the NKVD and held secret meetings with Lavrentiy Beria to report on the activities and attitudes of the JAC's members; during the war, he was supervised by the deputy head of the counterintelligence department of the NKVD, Leonid Raikhman.

Mikhoels and other members of the JAC guessed (or knew) about Feffer's connections with the NKVD, but did not hide anything from him, believing that they did not face any jeopardy, since all the activities of the committee were for the benefit of the state.

His play The Sun Doesn't Set was staged by the Moscow State Jewish Theatre in 1947.

With the outbreak of World War II, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, and the beginning of the mass extermination of the Jews, Feffer completely changed the essence of his poetry.

He wrote national Jewish songs and lamented the destruction of Eastern European Jewry.

His epic poem Di Shotns fun Varshever Geto ("The Shadows of the Warsaw Ghetto") is a tribute to the 750 Jews who rebelled against the Nazi liquidation of the ghetto and gave their lives fighting tyranny in what came to be known as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

His poems were widely translated into Russian and Ukrainian.

He is considered one of the greatest Soviet poets in the Yiddish language and his poems were widely admired inside and outside Russia.

Some of his poems were translated into Hebrew and published in the literary press and in anthologies by translators such as Avraham Shlunsky, Samson Meltzer, Moshe Basuk, Uriel Ofek and others.

No volume of his own has been translated into Hebrew in its entirety.

After the Second World War broke out, he was evacuated to Ufa.

Feffer enlisted in the Red Army for the second time, serving as a military reporter with the rank of colonel.

In 1948, after the assassination of Mikhoels, Feffer, along with other JAC members, was arrested and accused of treason.

Since Feffer had been an informer for the NKVD he reportedly hoped he would be treated differently and cooperated with the investigation, not only providing false information that would lead to the arrest and indictment of over a hundred people, but implicating himself.

Efforts were made abroad to save him.