Emmanuil Kazakevich (1913–1962)

Emmanuil Kazakevich was born to a Jewish family in Kremenchug, Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine). According to Yad Vashem, his father Henekh was a well-known Communist kulturtrager, or importer of culture, into Yiddish. The family lived in Gomel (Homiel), Moscow, and Kiev, and from 1924, in Kharkov, then the capital of Ukraine. Many Yiddish poets, writers, and actors visited their home on a regular basis. Growing up in this environment, Emmanuil showed both musical and literary talent from childhood. He received training as an engineer, but was more interested in literature. In 1930, he moved with his parents to the Jewish autonomous region of Birobidzhan in the Soviet Far East, where he became the chairman of a collective farm and ran a theater. During these years, he began writing and publishing poems and stories in Yiddish. His first collected book of poems was published in 1932. He also became known for his Yiddish translations of pre-revolutionary and Soviet Russian writers, including Pushkin, Lermontov, and Mayakovsky. In 1937, when Kazakevich and his family were on vacation in Moscow, he learned of the arrests of many members of the Yiddish-speaking intelligentsia in Birobidzhan as part of the Great Terror of 1937-1938, and that the authorities were looking for him. For 18 months, he, his wife, and their two daughters remained in hiding in a village in Belarus and in an area near Moscow until the wave of mass arrests halted in late 1938. His second book of poems, Groyse velt (This Wide World), was published the following year. In 1941, his Yiddish novel in verse, Sholem un Khave (Sholem and Eve), appeared and one of his plays was staged by the Birobidzhan Jewish Theater. After Nazi Germany invaded Russia in World War II, he volunteered for defense efforts in Moscow, and later joined the Red Army, serving as a front-line reporter. By 1943, he had become a military intelligence officer and eventually reached the rank of assistant head of intelligence of the 47th Army.
After 1945, Kazakevich wrote in Russian. His debut novel Zvezda (The Star, 1947) was an instant success, winning him the Stalin Prize for literature; it was adapted into a film in 1949 and again in 2002. Many of his later writings were inspired by his experiences in the war. Kazakevich's 1949 novel Vesna na Odere (Springtime on the Oder) won him a second Stalin Prize. During the 1950s, Kazakevich reached high positions in the Soviet Association of Writers. He was editor-in-chief of the journal Literaturnaia Moskva (Literary Moscow), which published many works that reflected new, post-Stalinist trends in Soviet literature.