David Hofstein

Who was David Hofstein?

David Hofstein was a Yiddish poet.

He was born in Ukraine, Russian Empire and received a traditional Jewish education; his application to the Kiev University was declined. Hofstein began to write in Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, and Ukrainian.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, which he welcomed, Hofstein wrote only in Yiddish. He was coeditor of the Moscow Yiddish monthly Shtrom, the last organ of free Jewish expression in the Soviet Union. The poems in which he acclaimed the communist regime established him as one of the Kiev triumvirate of Yiddish poets, along with Leib Kvitko and Peretz Markish.

Hofstein's elegies for Jewish communities devastated by the White movement pogroms appeared in 1922, with illustrations by Marc Chagall. Both had worked together as teachers at shelter for Jewish boys in suburban Malakhovka, which housed and employed boys orphaned by Ukrainian pogroms.

Hofstein protested the banning of Hebrew and the persecution of Hebrew writers, arousing the suspicion of the authorities. He therefore emigrated first to Germany and then to Palestine in 1923.