Literatureדוד קנוט

Dovid Knut

Dovid Knut was a Jewish poet who wrote in Russian and a founder of the Armée juive, a Jewish resistance movement in France during World War II.

1900 to 1955Russian-language poetry in ParisCo-founding the Armée juiveEditing Jewish newspapers in France

Born: 10 September 1900, Orhei
Died: 14 February 1955, Tel Aviv
Occupation: poet, journalist, French resistance fighter

Dovid Knut was born in 1900 in Orhei

Knut was born Duvid Fiksman in Orgeev in Bessarabia, the eldest son of a grocer. He grew up in Chișinău, where he studied in a cheder and a state school for Jews. He began publishing poems at 14 and in 1918 edited a magazine under the pen name Dovid Knut.

In 1920 the family moved to Paris. He worked in a factory, studied French at night, opened an eatery, studied chemistry at the University of Caen and worked as an engineer. He was active in émigré literary life, and his first poetry collection appeared in 1925.

In the 1930s he turned to Jewish activism and visited Palestine in 1937 with Ariadna Scriabine. From 1938 to 1939 he edited the Jewish newspaper L'Affirmation. In 1940 they married and moved to Toulouse, where they helped found the group that became the Armée juive.

In 1942, pursued by the Gestapo, he escaped to Switzerland. Ariadna was killed by the French Militia in Toulouse in 1944. After the war he worked in Paris and edited Le Monde juif from 1946.

In 1949 he moved to Israel with his family. He lived in Tel Aviv and taught Hebrew at an ulpan in Kiryat Motzkin. He died of brain cancer in 1955.