Yosef Ḳerler

Yosef Ḳerler was born in 1918 in Haisyn

Yosef Kerler was born in 1918 in Haisyn, Podolia, in the Russian Empire. From 1930 to 1934 he lived with his parents on a Jewish collective farm in Crimea.

From 1934 to 1937 he studied at a Jewish mechanics high school in Odessa, where he also learned Yiddish literature and began publishing poems in 1935. From 1937 to 1941 he studied in a theater workshop of the State Jewish Theater in Moscow. He later studied philology at Moscow State University.

After his service in the Red Army he published his first book in 1944 and worked for Yiddish periodicals. In 1947 he moved to Birobidzhan to work for a local newspaper. In April 1950 he was arrested after protesting the end of Yiddish teaching in local schools, and he was sentenced to 10 years in a labor camp in Vorkuta.

He was acquitted in 1955 and returned to Moscow, where a Russian translation of his poems appeared in 1957. He also wrote songs performed by Jewish singers. In the 1960s he campaigned to emigrate, and in 1970 he read an open letter demanding freedom of emigration for Soviet Jews.

In March 1971 he emigrated to Israel with his family, and his Gulag poems were published there, winning the Itzik Manger Prize. From 1973 he edited a Yiddish yearbook in Jerusalem, later with his son, the poet Boris Kerler. He died in Jerusalem in 2000.