Literary archives of the Yiddish poet, Chaim Beider

Copyright Holder: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum This collection contains correspondence and photographs related to Russian and Soviet Yiddish writers. Contains information about Russian and Soviet Yiddish artists and cultural activists, articles by and about Beider, drafts and copies of Beider's Der Freylekher Alef-beys ("The Happy Alphabet", an alphabet book for children), publications about Jewish life in Birobidzhan, manuscripts of unpublished books, and translations of operas, poems, plays, and songs into Yiddish. Chaim Volkovich Beider (born 20 April 1920, Kupel, Volochisk district, Xmelnitsk region – Died 7 December 2003, New York, USA) was a Soviet writer and journalist, and one of the most prominent scholars of Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union. He was also a philologist. In 1933 he graduated from a local Jewish school, and the next year he entered Odessa Pedagogical College. His first literary poetical debut was published in 1933 in the Yiddish children’s newspaper, followed by many other Yiddish Soviet publications, including “Eynikayt” (an organ of the Jewish anti-fascist committee). He lived in Ukraine and published research about the history of Ukrainian and Russian literature, but starting in the mid-1970s he turned his attention to research of classical Jewish literature. He worked for several years as a journalist in Ukraine and Turkmenistan, and several years at a newspaper called “Birobidzhaner Shtern” in the Jewish Autonomous Region. In 1973, he moved to Moscow and started work for the journal “Sovetish Geimland,” first as a head of the department, and then deputy chief editor. He retired in 1991 and dedicated the rest of his life to the research of the history of Yiddish literature in the Soviet Union. This culminated with the dictionary of biographies of Russian and Soviet Yiddish writers and poets. In 1996, he moved to New York and became editor-in-chief of the oldest Yiddish literary journal “Di Tsukunft.” He died in New York in December 2003.