Lada Kolomiyets
Dartmouth College, USA.
ORCID ID 0000-0002-8327-6672
DOI: https://doi.org/10.37627/2311-9489-28-2025-2.99-112
Keywords: Babyn Yar, Holocaust, literature in Yiddish, Red Renaissance, Soviet Ukraine, Yiddish-Ukrainian translation.
Abstract.
The notable rise in Yiddish literary activity in Soviet Ukraine during the 1920s and early 1930s can be attributed to the Bolshevik policy of indigenization, which promoted minority languages such as Yiddish and Ukrainian. Ukrainian was spoken by the majority of the rural and small-town, non-industrial population, though it was not prevalent among urban and industrial communities. This policy encouraged a significant expansion of translations between the “fraternal” literatures of the Soviet republics, as well as among the languages within Ukraine — often mediated through Russian as an intermediary.
By the mid-1930s, however, Stalin’s national policy shifted from fostering minority literatures to suppressing what was labeled as “nationalism” among the peoples of the USSR. This article investigates the nature and scope of translations from Yiddish — then the language of Jewish modernist revolutionary writers — into Ukrainian during the 1920s and 1930s. It employs the microhistory of the Jewish writer Peretz Markish and his family to trace the trajectories of Jewish intellectuals in the Soviet Union during the interwar period, emphasizing the importance of family ties and personal friendships between Ukrainian and Yiddish writers.
The analysis also considers the rapid, though ideologically constrained, response of Ukrainian poets and translators of Yiddish literature to the Holocaust, epitomized by the victims of Babyn Yar, as refracted through the prism of Stalinist censorship.
Author’s biography.
Lada Kolomiyets, professor, Doctor of Philological Sciences, visiting professor at the Department of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Studies, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Dartmouth College, USA.
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The article was received by the editorial office on 19.12.2025.
The article was accepted for publication after review on 27.12.2025.
The article was published on 31.12.2025.
Section: UKRAINIAN CULTURE.