Ezra Iosifovich Fininberg

Fininberg, Ezra Iosifovich 

Born Nov. 17 (29), 1899, in Uman’; died Nov. 22, 1946, in Moscow. Soviet Jewish poet.

Fininberg was self-educated and worked as a teacher. He fought in the Great Patriotic War (1941–45). Fininberg began publishing in Russian in 1917 and in Yiddish in 1920. His first collections, Breath (1922) and Poems (1925), were marked by pessimism and the influence of symbolism, traits that were abandoned in the collections The Land and Love (1928), Morning of the Year (1929), and The Battles Continue (1930). Fininberg’s collections Another Land (1934), Melodiousness (1936), and Lyrics (1940) glorified the heroic spirit of revolution and the building of socialism. The Great Patriotic War was depicted in the collections In the Great Fire (1946) and Selected Works (published 1948).

Fininberg was also a literary critic and a literary historian. He translated Goethe’s Faust and Hugo’s Ninety-three into Yiddish.

WORKS

In Russian translation:
Izbrannoe: Stikhi i poemy. [Introductory article by S. Lipkin.] Moscow, 1957.
Stikhi. Moscow, 1965.

REFERENCES

Gurshtein, A. “Tvorcheskii put’ poeta E. Fininberga.” In the collection Izbrannye stat’i. Moscow, 1959.
Remenik, G. “Motivn fun ’vei un mut.’” Sovetish heimland, 1967, no. 4.
Vergelis, A. “Aza liebschaft foterland.” Ibid., 1969, no. 12.

G. A. REMENIK