Shtetl

Poet and political activist Sofia Dubnova-Erlich was born in Mstislavl, Belorussia, the eldest daughter of historian Simon Dubnow. She studied at St. Petersburg University and the Sorbonne. After she married Henryk Erlich, a leader of the Bund in Poland, the political situation drove Dubnova-Erlich and her husband to move to Warsaw in 1918. During World War II, Henryk was arrested and murdered by the Soviet authorities, and Dubnova-Erlich settled in Vilna until 1941, after which she escaped to the United States, where she learned of her husband’s death and her father’s murder in the Holocaust. She continued to advocate for civil rights, contributing essays and translations to the Russian- and Yiddish-language press.