Leksikon fun der Nayer Yidisher Literatur

לעקסיקאָן פֿון דער נײַער ייִדישער ליטעראַטור

A Soviet Yiddish folklorist, literary scholar, and translator, he was born in Zhytomyr, Ukraine. He graduated from a Jewish work school in 1922 and from the Kiev Jewish pedagogical technicum in 1926. He then became a teacher of Yiddish language and literature in Kiev schools.

In 1929 he joined the ethnographic section of the Kiev Institute for Jewish Culture in the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences as a research student. From 1931 he was a scholarly contributor to the institute, and he joined expeditions to towns in Ukraine to collect and publish a series of folklore collections.

He debuted in print in

Tsaytshrift (Periodical) (Minsk) 5 (1931), with a piece entitled “Vegn folks-iberarbetunger fun gotlobers lider” (On popular revisions of Gotlober’s poetry).

In the anthology Problemes fun folkloristik (Issues in folkloristics) (Kharkov-Kiev) of 1932, he placed “Vegn folklorishn arbeter-lid” (On folkloric workers’ poems).

He also contributed to the quarterly journal, V

isnshaft un revolutsye (Science and revolution) (Kiev) 2.6 (April-June 1935), with an essay: “Vegn ukrainishe virkungen in der yidishn folklor-lid” (On Ukrainian influences on the Jewish folkloric poem).

He translated

S. Grigor'ev’s Tonkes tank (Tonke’s tank [original Ton'kin tank]) (Kiev: Kultur-Lige, 1930), 27 pp., and

V. Vladimirskii’s A kop in shtaygl, dertseylungen fun lebn in mayrev-ukraine (Head in a cage, stories of life in Western Ukraine) (Kiev: Kultur-Lige, 1930), 47 pp.

In the anthology

Folklor-lider, naye materyaln zamlung (Folkloric poetry, new material collection), edited by Meyer Viner, Skuditski prepared the poems for publication and wrote an introduction and annotations (Moscow: Emes, 1933), 142 pp.

In book form, he also published:

A khaver in shlakht (A comrade in battle), stories (Kharkov-Kiev: Ukrainian State Publishers for National Minorities, 1934), 54 pp.

In the second volume of

Folklor-lider, he penned the preface (80 pp.) (Moscow: Emes, 1936), 392 pp.

Together with Avrom Velednitski, he compiled

Literarishe khrestomatye, farn VI klas fun der mitlshul (Literary reader, for the sixth school year in middle school) (Kharkov-Kiev: Ukrainian State Publishers for National Minorities, 1933), 230 pp., second improved edition (Kharkov-Kiev: Ukrainian State Publishers for National Minorities, 1934), 280 pp., third edition (1935), 124 pp., fourth edition (1936), 130 pp.

In 1937 he was purged together with a number of other contributors at the institute and exiled to a camp in the north. He was “rehabilitated” (i.e., exonerated) in the 1950s and lived in Sverdlovsk.