Itzik Feffer


Itzik Feffer, also Fefer was a Soviet Yiddish poet executed on the Night of the Murdered Poets during Joseph Stalin's purges.

Early life

Itzik Feffer was born in Shpola, a town in Zvenigorod uyezd of Kiev guberniya, Imperial Russia.

Career

World War II

During the Second World War, he was a military reporter with the rank of colonel and was vice chairman of the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. He and Solomon Mikhoels travelled to the United States in 1943 in a well-documented fund-raising trip.

Arrest and death

In 1948, after the assassination of the JAC Chairman Solomon Mikhoels, Feffer, along with other JAC members, was arrested and accused of treason. Feffer had been an informer for the NKVD since 1943. Feffer reportedly cooperated with the investigation, providing false information that would lead to the arrest and indictment of over a hundred people, but at the trial, he made openly nationalistic statements and expressed pride in his Jewish identity. 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". However, in 1952, Feffer, along with other defendants, was tried at a closed JAC trial, and executed on 12 August 1952, at Lubyanka prison.
Feffer was rehabilitated posthumously in 1955, after Stalin's death.

Paul Robeson

The American concert singer and actor Paul Robeson 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.
Six years later, in June 1949, during the 150th-anniversary celebration of the birth of Alexander Pushkin, Robeson visited the Soviet Union to sing in concert. According to David Horowitz
During his concert in Tchaikovsky Hall on 14 June - which was broadcast across the entire country - Robeson publicly paid tribute to Feffer and the late Mikhoels, singing the Vilna Partisan song "Zog Nit Keynmol" in both Russian and Yiddish. Recordings of the concert survived, but Robeson's spoken words are lost.

Literary work

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

Di Shotns fun Varshever Geto

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 during World War II.

Books of poetry