A Soviet Shtetl

The shtetl, a much maligned subject in Soviet Jewish culture, became the focal point in the postwar reportorial writing of Shmuel Gordon. Born in Kovno (Kaunas), Gordon was orphaned and grew up in Ukraine. He studied at the Yiddish department of the Second Moscow State University, graduating in 1931, and pursued a career as a prose writer and journalist, often writing about Jewish communities in Birobidzhan and agricultural settlements. His first collection of stories was published in 1934. He was employed by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during the Second World War. Imprisoned by Stalin in 1949 as a conspiratorial Jewish intellectual, Gordon survived in the gulags until 1956. He later returned to Moscow and wrote witty reportage for the journal Sovetish heymland. His last major work was a novel about the persecution and murder of Soviet Yiddish intelligentsia.