The literary development of Yekhiel Shraybman: a Jewish writer in Soviet clothing

Abstract

This article examines the literary career of the last Bessarabian Yiddish writer of his generation Yekhiel Shraybman (1913–2005). His loss is still deeply felt by the Moldovan Jewish community as his life and writings embraced the country’s historic Jewish past. As his literary career was launched and developed in the Soviet Union his work, aesthetics and politics were affected by “Sovietisation,” a requirement of the Communist Party’s standards in relation to literature. Yet behind the ambivalent glamour of the title “Soviet writer,” he managed to remain a Jewish writer and leave behind a printed memory of his home shtetl, Rashkov.