David Hofstein (1889–1952)

David Hofstein or Dovid Hofshteyn was born to a Jewish family in Korostyshiv, Ukraine, near Kiev, and received a traditional Jewish education. Hofstein began to write in Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, and Ukrainian. His sister Shifra Kholodenko also became a poet. After 1917, Hofstein wrote only in Yiddish. He was co-editor of the Moscow Yiddish monthly Shtrom. His poems about Jewish communities devastated by the White movement pogroms appeared in 1922, with illustrations by Marc Chagall. They had worked together as teachers at a shelter in Malakhovka for boys orphaned by Ukrainian pogroms. Hofstein protested the banning of Hebrew and the persecution of Hebrew writers, arousing the suspicion of the Soviet authorities. He then emigrated first to Germany and then to the British Mandate of Palestine in 1923. There he wrote the dramatic poem Sha'ul–Der Letster Meylekh fun Yisroel (Saul–The Last King of Israel, 1924) and an expressionistic drama Meshiekhs Tsaytn (Messianic Times, 1925). He returned to Kiev in 1926 to find himself compelled to write poems praising the Communist Party. In 1939, Hofstein finally became a Party member. He hailed the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. However, that same year, after Joseph Stalin withdrew his support for Israel, Hofstein was arrested, together with other members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. They were tortured, beaten, and isolated for three years before being falsely charged with espionage Hofstein was executed along with 12 others on August 12–13, 1952, known as the Night of the Murdered Poets. After the death of Stalin, they were posthumously rehabilitated, and Hofstein's selected works were republished in a Russian translation in 1958.