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David Hofstein ( Dovid Hofshteyn, ; 1889 — August 12, 1952) was a Yiddish
Yiddish language

Yiddish is a non-territorial High German languages of Jewish origin, spoken throughout the world. Unlike other such languages, Yiddish is written with the Hebrew alphabet as opposed to a Latin alphabet....
 poet
Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry....
.

He was born in Ukraine
Ukraine

Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Russia to the east; Belarus to the north; Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary to the west; Romania and Moldova to the southwest; and the Black Sea and Sea of Azov to the south....
 and received a traditional Jew
Jew

A Jew is a member of the Jewish people, an ethnoreligious group that traces its ancestry to the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East....
ish education; his application to the Kiev University
Kiev University

Kiev University or officially the National Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv is the university located in Kiev , the capital of Ukraine....
 was declined. Hofstein began to write in Yiddish, Hebrew
Hebrew language

Hebrew is a Semitic languages of the Afro-Asiatic languages. Modern Hebrew is spoken by more than seven million people in Israel and Classical Hebrew is used for prayer or study in Jews communities around the world....
, Russian
Russian language

Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe....
, and Ukrainian
Ukrainian language

Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic languages of the Slavic languages. It is the official language of Ukraine. In some areas of Russia there are dialects, Balachka or Surzhyk, which are the Ukrainianized versions of the Russian language....
.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917
Russian Revolution of 1917

The Russian Revolution is the series of revolutions in Russia in 1917, which destroyed the Tsarist autocracy and led to the creation of the Soviet Union....
, which he welcomed, Hofstein wrote only in Yiddish. He was coeditor of the Moscow
Moscow

Moscow is the capital and the largest types of inhabited localities in Russia of the Russian Federation. It is also the largest European cities and metropolitan areas, with the Moscow metropolitan area ranking among the largest urban areas in the world....
 Yiddish monthly Shtrom, the last organ of free Jewish expression in the Soviet Union
Soviet Union

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a Constitution of the Soviet Union socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991.The name is a translation of the , romanization of Russian Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated ????, SSSR....
.






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David Hofstein ( Dovid Hofshteyn, ; 1889 — August 12, 1952) was a Yiddish
Yiddish language

Yiddish is a non-territorial High German languages of Jewish origin, spoken throughout the world. Unlike other such languages, Yiddish is written with the Hebrew alphabet as opposed to a Latin alphabet....
 poet
Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry....
.

He was born in Ukraine
Ukraine

Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Russia to the east; Belarus to the north; Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary to the west; Romania and Moldova to the southwest; and the Black Sea and Sea of Azov to the south....
 and received a traditional Jew
Jew

A Jew is a member of the Jewish people, an ethnoreligious group that traces its ancestry to the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East....
ish education; his application to the Kiev University
Kiev University

Kiev University or officially the National Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv is the university located in Kiev , the capital of Ukraine....
 was declined. Hofstein began to write in Yiddish, Hebrew
Hebrew language

Hebrew is a Semitic languages of the Afro-Asiatic languages. Modern Hebrew is spoken by more than seven million people in Israel and Classical Hebrew is used for prayer or study in Jews communities around the world....
, Russian
Russian language

Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe....
, and Ukrainian
Ukrainian language

Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic languages of the Slavic languages. It is the official language of Ukraine. In some areas of Russia there are dialects, Balachka or Surzhyk, which are the Ukrainianized versions of the Russian language....
.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917
Russian Revolution of 1917

The Russian Revolution is the series of revolutions in Russia in 1917, which destroyed the Tsarist autocracy and led to the creation of the Soviet Union....
, which he welcomed, Hofstein wrote only in Yiddish. He was coeditor of the Moscow
Moscow

Moscow is the capital and the largest types of inhabited localities in Russia of the Russian Federation. It is also the largest European cities and metropolitan areas, with the Moscow metropolitan area ranking among the largest urban areas in the world....
 Yiddish monthly Shtrom, the last organ of free Jewish expression in the Soviet Union
Soviet Union

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a Constitution of the Soviet Union socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991.The name is a translation of the , romanization of Russian Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated ????, SSSR....
. The poems in which he acclaimed the communist regime established him as one of the Kiev
Kiev

Kiev, also known as Kyiv , is the Capital and the largest city of Ukraine, located in the north central part of the country on the Dnieper River....
 triumvirate of Yiddish poets, along with Leib Kvitko
Leib Kvitko

Leib Kvitko was a prominent Yiddish poet, an author of well-known children's poems and a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee . He was one of the editors of Einigkeit and of the Heymland, a literary magazine....
 and Peretz Markish
Peretz Markish

Peretz Markish was a Jewish Soviet writer who wrote in Yiddish. His very distant ancestors lived in Spain. As a child he attended a cheder and was singing in the choir of the local synagogue....
.

Hofstein's elegies for Jewish communities devastated by the White movement
White movement

The White movement , whose military arm is known as the White Army or White Guard and whose members are known as Whites comprised some of the Russian forces, both political and military, which opposed the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution and fought against the Red Army during the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1923...
 pogrom
Pogrom

A pogrom is a form of riot directed against a particular group, whether ethnic, religious, or other, and characterized by the killing and destruction of their homes, businesses, and religious centers....
s appeared in 1922, with illustrations by Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall ; [shuh-GAHL] , was a Jewish Russians artist, born in Belarus and naturalized France in 1937, associated with several key art movements and was one of the most successful artists of the twentieth century....
. Hofstein protested the banning of Hebrew and the persecution of Hebrew writers, arousing the suspicion of the authorities. He therefore emigrated first to Germany and then to Palestine
Palestine

Palestine is a name which has been widely used since Roman times to refer to the region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. It is derived from a name used already much earlier for a narrower geographical region, mainly along the coastal region....
 in 1923. In Palestine he wrote both in Hebrew and Yiddish and published in Yiddish the dramatic poem Sha'ul–Der Letster Meylekh fun Yisroel (Saul–The Last King of Israel, 1924) and an expressionistic drama Meshiekhs Tsaytn (Messianic Times, 1925). He returned to Kiev in 1926 only to find himself compelled to write poems adulatory of the Communist Party
Communist Party of the Soviet Union

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest Communist Party in the world....
. Hofstein hailed the establishment of the State of Israel
Israel

Israel officially the State of Israel , is a country in the Middle East located on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It borders Lebanon in the north, Syria in the northeast, Jordan in the east, and Egypt on the southwest, and contains geographically diverse features within its relatively small area....
 in 1948; however, in the same year, when Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death in 1953....
 withdrew his support for Israel, Hofstein was arrested, together with Kvitko, Markish and other members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee
Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was formed in Samara, Russia in April 1942 with the official support of the Soviet authorities. It was designed to influence international public opinion and organize political and material support for the Soviet fight against Nazi Germany, particularly from the Western world....
 and transported first to Moscow and then to Siberia
Siberia

Siberia , is the name given to the vast region constituting almost all of North Asia and for the most part currently serving as the massive central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, having served in the same capacity previously for the Soviet Union from its beginning, and the Russian Empire beginning in the 16th century....
. He was executed on the Night of the Murdered Poets
Night of the Murdered Poets

The Night of the Murdered Poets refers to the night of 12 to 13 August 1952, when thirteen of the most prominent Yiddish writers, poets, artists, musicians and actors of the Soviet Union were secretly executed on the orders from Joseph Stalin in the basement of the Lubyanka prison in Moscow....
 (August 12-13, 1952), together with twelve other Yiddish writers and artists. After the death of Stalin, they were posthumously rehabilitated, and Hofstein's selected works reappeared in a Russian translation in 1958.

See also

  • History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union
    History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union

    The vast territories of the Russian Empire at one time hosted the largest Jewish diaspora in the world. Within these territories the Jewish community flourished and developed many of modern Judaism's most distinctive theological and cultural traditions, while also facing periods of intense antisemitism discriminatory policies and persecutions....