The Zelmenyaners: A Family Saga

Moyshe Kulbak is widely considered one of the most popular and important Yiddish writers of the early Soviet period. A teacher, poet, and novelist, Kulbak was a leader of Yiddish cultural organizations in all the cities he lived in, including Vilna, Berlin, and finally Minsk, then the capital of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. His work was firmly modernist in style and content, characterized by lyricism in his poetry, dynamism and reflection in his prose, and a sense of rootedness in the landscapes and experience of everyday Lithuanian Jews throughout all his work. His novel Zelmanyaner is a masterful satire of Jewish life before, during, and after the Bolshevik Revolution, a text filled with insight and irony in its description of generational conflict and cultural adaptation. Kulbak was a victim of the particularly violent Stalinist Purges that liquidated much of the Soviet Yiddish intelligentsia in Minsk.