Chaim Sloves
Playwright Chaim (Henri) Sloves was born in Bialystok and attended Yiddish secular school. After spending time in Moscow, he joined the Communist Party and was arrested in Warsaw upon his return to Poland. Sloves then studied law at the Sorbonne, graduating in 1935. He was an organizer of the World Congress for Yiddish Culture and a founder of the Yidishe Kultur Farband. During World War II, he was active in the French underground. His play Haman’s Downfall, with Haman an obvious stand-in for Hitler, was particularly popular in the immediate aftermath of the war.