Eli Shechtman

Eli Shechtman was born in 1908 in Vas'kovichi

Eli Shechtman was born in 1908 in the shtetl of Vas'kovychi, near Zhytomyr in Ukraine. He was the seventh of eight children, and his mother died when he was a child. He studied at a cheder and later at a yeshiva in Zhytomyr.

In 1926 he moved to Odesa, where he studied literature at the Odessa Jewish Pedagogical Institute from 1929 to 1932. He married the actress Sheindl Magazinnik and lived in Kharkiv and then Kyiv. In the 1930s he published novels in Yiddish and joined the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934.

During World War II he served in the Red Army and fought until the end of the war. In March 1953 he was imprisoned and charged with espionage and Zionism. He was released several months after Stalin's death for lack of evidence.

After his release he began the novel Erev, whose first 2 books appeared in 1962. He completed all 7 books in 1983, and parts were translated into French, English and Hebrew.

In 1972 he immigrated to Israel and settled in Jerusalem. He criticized the status of Yiddish in Israel and in 1991 refused to take part in an anthology of Yiddish writers in the country. He died in 1996 and is buried in Kiryat Bialik.