"When the mass terror erupted in 1936, however, Birobidzhan would be the stage of frightful liquidations, a real pogrom against Jewish communists, the pioneers of this 'centre of Jewish culture. From one day to the next, Professor Liberberg, president of the republic's executive committee, disappeared; a few months later, a newspaper revealed that he had been 'unmasked' as a 'cowardly counterrevolutionary and Trotskyist, a bourgeois nationalist'; in 1937 and 1938, his successors experienced the same fate. In all the regions where a Jewish population was concentrated, thousands of activists of the Jewish sections, party militants, journalists of the Yiddish press and other writers were arrested; among many others, such major figures as Isaac Babel and Osip Mandelstam vanished in the maelstrom."
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Novelists from RussiaShort story writers from RussiaPlaywrights from RussiaScreenwriters from RussiaJournalists from Russia
Original Language: English
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Sources
Alain Brossat and Sylvia Klingberg, Revolutionary Yiddishland: A History of Jewish Radicalism (2016)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Isaac_Babel
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Isaac Babel
Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel ( – 27 January 1940) was a Russian writer, journalist, playwright and literary translator.
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