Itzik Feffer
The communist anthem The Internationale appears in a Yiddish version that became very popular, in the songbook he edited with Moshe Beregovski, which was published in Kiev in 1938.
"[2] His poetry reflected pride in both his Jewish heritage and the Soviet Union, a good example being his poem “Ikh bin a Yid” (I Am a Jew).
He began writing poems in 1918, and in 1922 joined the Vidervuks (New Growth) group of young literary Yiddish poets and writers mentored by Dovid Hofshteyn; his first published collection of poetry, titled "Shpener" (Splinters), brought him to prominence quickly.
Gennady Estraikh comments that "[h]is poetry amalgamated the Kultur-lige poets' revolutionary romanticism with the propagandist objectives of the workers' movement."
His approach to literature differed from over Soviet Yiddish poets of the 1920s avant-garde in that Fefer strove for a kind of plain clarity he called proste reyd (simple speech).
His play Di zun fargeyt nisht (The Sun Doesn't Set) was staged by the Moscow State Jewish Theatre in 1947.
[7] With the outbreak of World War II, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, and the beginning of the mass extermination of the Jews, Feffer's poetry changed markedly in tone.
In February 1944, together with Mikhoels and Shakne Epshtein, he signed a letter to Joseph Stalin with a request to organize an autonomous Jewish region in the Crimea.
Mikhoels and other members of the JAC guessed (or knew) about Feffer's connections with the NKVD, but did not hide anything from him, believing that they did not face any jeopardy, since all the activities of the committee were for the benefit of the state.
The American concert singer and actor Paul Robeson had met Feffer on 8 July 1943, in New York during a Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee event chaired by Albert Einstein, one of the largest pro-Soviet rallies ever held in the United States.
The reality was that Feffer had already been in prison for a half year, and his Soviet captors did not want to bring him to Robeson immediately because he had become emaciated from lack of food.
While Robeson waited in Moscow, Stalin's police brought Feffer out of prison, put him the care of doctors, and began fattening him up for the interview.
[8]During his concert in Tchaikovsky Hall on 14 June - which was broadcast across the entire country - Robeson publicly paid tribute to Feffer and the late Mikhoels, singing the Vilna Partisan song "Zog Nit Keynmol" in both Russian and Yiddish.
[10][11] Returning to the US, Robeson organized a letter in defense of Feffer, which was signed by writer Howard Fast and the then-chairman of the World Peace Council, French physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie, among others.
In 1952, however, Feffer, along with other defendants, was tried at a closed trial of JAC members, ostensibly due to their support of the American-backed proposal to establish an autonomous region for Jews in the Crimea.
The tribunal convicted him of giving "slanderous information about the situation of Jews in the USSR" to an American contact, as noted in a letter from Minister of State Security Semyon Ignatyev to the Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU Georgy Malenkov dated February 7, 1953.
