Abtshuk, Avraham
ABTSHUK, AVRAHAM
ABTSHUK, AVRAHAM (Avrom ; 1897–1937), Soviet Yiddish writer and critic. Born in Lutsk, Volhynia, he lived in Kiev after 1921. In the late 1920s and 1930s he was associated with the Jewish Research Institute of the Ukrainian Academy of Science in Kiev. In 1926 he began contributing short stories to the Kharkov-based literary journal Di Royte Velt and is best known for Hershl Shamay (1929; part 2, 1934), an occasionally humorous narrative which deals with the industrialization of Jewish workers under the Soviets. Abtshuk's Etyudn un Materyaln tsu der Geshikhte fun der Yidisher Literatur-Bavegung in F.S.R.R. ("Studies and Materials for the History of the Yiddish Literature Movement in Soviet Russia," 1934) is important both as a document and as a source of documents; it contains minutes, letters, and resolutions of Yiddish literary groups in Kiev, Moscow, Kharkov, and Minsk. Abtshuk was associate editor of the proletarian writers' periodical Prolit (1928–32) and its successor Farmest (1933–37). Accused of Trotskyist tendencies and Jewish nationalism, allegedly evident in Hershl Shamay, he perished during the Stalinist "purges."
bibliography:
A.Pomerantz, Di Sovetishe Harugey Malkhes (1962), 44–51, 428–9; lnyl, 1 (1956), 2–3. add. bibliography: G. Estraikh, in: Slovo, 7 (1994), 1–12.
[Leonard Prager /
Gennady Estraikh (2nd ed.)]