Moyshe Kulbak

Moishe Kulbak (also: Moshe Kulbak; * 1896 in Smorgon in Vilna, then Poland, now Belarus, † 1940) was a Belarusian- Lithuanian Yiddish poet who had initially started with Hebrew poetry. He was one of the great talents of Yiddish poetry of his time. Many of his thoughts and lavishly illustrated songs, in which he places the upheaval of revolution in free-flowing rhythms were expressed to popular battle songs of the Jewish revolutionary youth.

In his childhood, he learned Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, and was a teacher of Hebrew at private schools and at the Jewish Teachers' Seminary.

After a stay in Berlin (since 1920) Kulbak returned first to Lithuania back (1923, to Vilna, at that time a center of Yiddish culture ), then moved but for ideological reasons in the Soviet Union (1927 Minsk), where he joined in 1928 the Minsk Group joined and was forced to replace his more neo-romantic style of socialist realism.

As of 1936, the Minsk Group was disbanded and arrested Kulbak. He died in 1940 in a Siberian labor camps of the Gulag.

Works (selection)

• Schirim, 1920 ( "Songs " is indeed in the figure, the chimney sweep Shmuel Itze in Yiddish, " Lamed Wow " = 36, the most famous of these poems, which describes one of the 36 unknown righteous Jewish legend, and, under the new edition of the collection the Yiddish title eyelids, Berlin 1922)
• New songs, Warsaw 1922
• Jacob Frank, 1923 ( Drama )
• Moshiach ben Efraim, 1924 ( expressionist novel; German: " The Messiah of the tribe of Ephraim A Jewish legend. " )
• Monday, 1926 ( lyrical- philosophical novel )
• Zelmenianer ( two-part novel: 1931, 1935, tells a humorous way of the adjustment difficulties of a Jewish family in the communist society; German " The Selmenianer " )
• Disner Childe Harold, 1933 (from Heine's " Winter's Tale" influenced, on his stay in Germany declining satire on the alleged decadence of the German bourgeoisie )