Shveln (Thresholds), a poetry collection by Perets Markish. (Kiev: Yidisher folks farlag, 1919). Cover illustration by Iosif Chaikov; also illustrated by El Lissitzky. (Gross Family Collection)
(1895–1952), Yiddish poet, prose writer, playwright, and essayist. Perets Markish was born to impoverished parents in Polonnoye, a town in Volhynia. He received a hedereducation and left home at a young age, working at various incidental jobs, including as a choirboy for a cantor. During World War I he was drafted into the Russian army. After his discharge from the military during the March Revolution of 1917, he settled in Ekaterinoslav.
Markish began writing Russian poetry in his youth but made his debut in 1917 with poems in Yiddish, which were infused with the declarative pathos and the apocalyptic mood that would remain characteristic of his writing through the 1920s. In 1918, he relocated to Kiev and took part in the Eygns anthologies (1918–1920), which heralded renewed Yiddish literary creativity in Ukraine after World War I. Four collections of his poetry appeared in Ekaterinoslav and Kiev in 1919.
As was the case with many Yiddish writers, Markish left Kiev. Convoluted wanderings brought him to Warsaw in 1921, and he remained there until his return to the Soviet Union in 1926. However, during those years he also spent periods of time in Berlin, Paris, and London, and visited Palestine.
In Warsaw, Markish allied himself with poets Uri Tsevi Grinberg and Melech Ravitch, who in the early 1920s transformed the city into the center of Yiddish modernism in Eastern Europe.
Markish’s poetry, as one of the most characteristic incarnations of Yiddish expressionism, evoked strong opposition from Hillel Zeitlin and other writers. Ravitch countered their criticism with a brochure titled Pro Perets Markish (1922). This polemic illustrates the provocative impulse that was then so characteristic of Yiddish modernism in general, and of Markish in particular.
Markish, Grinberg, and Ravitch all edited literary publications that were fated to be short-lived. Markish’s almanac Khalyastre (Gang) appeared in 1922, coedited with I. J. Singer. In its manifesto, written with hyperbole, Markish declares: “Our criterion is not beauty, but horror.” The second and final issue of Khalyastre,edited with Oyzer Varshavski, appeared in Paris in 1924 with a cover illustration by Marc Chagall.
Markish’s most important poetic achievement at that point was his long poem Di kupe (The Heap; 1921 [Warsaw], 1922 [Kiev]). Its horrifying opening image is a pile of corpses laid out in the middle of the marketplace of a shtetl in Ukraine after a pogrom. The poet gives voice both to the unburied and to himself in a series of poetic monologues whose intent is to shock with their blasphemy while expressing the desire to freeze time in an apocalyptic desecration of God and death. The sharply expressionistic language and extensive use of Slavicisms create an ostensibly low stylistic register.
In 1924, Markish was a cofounder of the weekly journal Literarishe bleter in Warsaw. In the first year of its publication, Markish became one of its regular contributors, and submitted literary portraits and feature articles about cultural and literary questions. His sonnet series Fun der heym(From Home) and Zkeynes (Old Women), both from 1925–1926, reveal his deepened and enriched lyricism.
In 1926, Markish settled in the Soviet Union, a move that had a fateful effect on his life and work. This decision closed the modernist period of his writing, although the Soviet editions of his books included some of his earlier writing in reworked and censored versions. Initially he clashed sharply with the leading figures of Soviet Yiddish cultural life, and suffered attacks by the so-called Proletarian writers.
The 1930s saw the establishment of Markish’s status as one of the most important Soviet Yiddish writers; he was, for example, the only Yiddish writer to receive the Order of Lenin (1939).
From 1939 to 1943, Markish headed the Yiddish section of the Soviet Writers Union, and he joined the Communist Party in 1942. He was a member of the executive board of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and of the editorial board of its journal, Eynikayt. Along with Ilya Ehrenburgand Yitskhok Nusinov, he thought the committee should be active in Jewish affairs within the Soviet Union and should not limit itself to the propaganda abroad that was demanded of it by the Soviet leadership.
Markish was arrested in January 1949 as part of the liquidation campaign undertaken against the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and against the remnants of official Jewish cultural activity in the Soviet Union. After an extended period of suffering in prison, an orchestrated trial sentenced Markish to death along with most of the accused. The verdict was carried out in secret on 12 August 1952 in Moscow.
