Moses Broderson (1890–1956)

Moyshe Broderzon was born to a Jewish family in Moscow, Russia. The family was expelled from the country the following year, and split up; they were finally reunited in Łódź, Poland when he was 10 years old. He was educated at a Łódź business school and became a bookkeeper. He began working as a journalist and writing short stories for the Yiddish press, and published his first collection of poems in 1914. His poetry combined Jewish folklore with European Expressionism. He also wrote plays and founded several theaters in Łódź. He was a founder of the Jewish avant-garde literary group Yung-Yidish, which published a journal of the same name, and discovered many new Jewish talents. He wrote songs for children and libretti for operas, including Dovid un Bas-Sheve (David and Bathsheba, 1924). In 1939, Broderzon and his wife Sheyne Miriam fled Poland after Nazi Germany invaded in World War II, and returned to his native Moscow. They worked in the Yiddish theater there and became Soviet citizens. At the time of Stalin's persecutions of Jewish writers, he was arrested and imprisoned in a forced labor camp in Siberia for five years. Following the death of Stalin, he was released in 1955 and repatriated to Poland, where he was greeted with enthusiasm by the surviving Jews there. He collapsed and died a few weeks later of a heart attack while visiting Warsaw. Sheyne Miriam Broderzon described their years of suffering in a memoir entitled Mayn Laydnsveg mit Moyshe Broderzon (My Tragic Road with Moyshe Broderzon), published in 1960. His Oysgeklibene Shriftn (Selected Works, 1959) and a volume called Dos Letste Lid (The Last Poem, 1974) appeared posthumously.