Yechiel Shraibman (1913–2005)

Yechiel Shraibman was born to an impoverished Jewish family in Rashkov, a shtetl then in Bessarabia, Romania (present-day Moldova). He had a traditional Jewish education, attended a local Romanian elementary school. and completed an apprenticeship as a watchmaker. After working various jobs such as a village teacher and weaver, in 1930 he began studying at the Czernowitz Hebrew Teachers' College in Austria. After being arrested for revolutionary ideas and being expelled from the seminar, he went into hiding in Bucharest. There he worked in the Yiddish theater and began to write. He made his literary debut in 1936 with stories and a novella published in the Warsaw paper Naye Folkstsaytung and in the New York magazine Signal. In 1940, he returned with his family to Kishinev, which had become a part of the Soviet Union, and in 1941 was admitted to the Soviet Union of Writers. He survived World War II as a farm laborer in Uzbekistan with his wife Olga.

The Stalinist era, during which a number of Jewish authors and artists were murdered, were deeply traumatic for him. During this time, he published nothing, which led to his expulsion from the Writers' Union. This event triggered a serious life and creative crisis, which he was only able to overcome in literature at the beginning of the 1960s. From 1961, he published a large number of his works in Sovetish Hejmland, a Yiddish-language Soviet magazine, and also worked for its editors. From 1994 until his death, he acted as organizer and chairman of the Jidisch-Zenters in Chişinău, Moldova.

He also published a number of other stories, most of them in Moldovan and Russian. Some of his works have also been translated into Romanian, Armenian, French, Bashkir, Uzbek, Hebrew, and German, and have received a variety of awards over the years.