Shmuel Halkin (1897–1960)

Shmuel Halkin was born to a Hasidic Jewish family in Rahachow, Russian Empire (present-day Belarus), the youngest of nine children. He was educated by an elder brother, an enthusiast of Hebrew and Russian literature. He wrote poetry first in Hebrew, then from 1921 in Yiddish. In 1917, he went to Kiev, Ukraine, to study painting, but then moved to Ekaterinoslav, where his first poems were published in the anthology Trep (Stairs), edited by Perets Markish. Halkin's first collected volume, Lider (Songs), appeared in 1922; that year he moved to Moscow. Other volumes of poems and plays followed between 1929 and 1948. He translated some of Shakespeare's plays and some of the works of Pushkin, Gorki, Yesenin, Blok, Mayakovsky, and other Russian authors into Yiddish. His version of King Lear was performed to great acclaim by the Moscow State Yiddish Theater in 1935. During World War II, Halkin was a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and served on the editorial board of its journal Eynikayt, in which he would later publish poems about the Holocaust. He was arrested in 1949 alongside other members of the committee and sent to a prison camp rather than executed. He was released in 1955, rehabilitated, and given the Order of the Red Banner.