Shmerke Kaczerginski
Shmerke Kaczerginski | |
|---|---|
Shmerke Kaczerginski (left) and Abraham Sutzkever (right) in 1930s | |
| Born | Shmaryahu Kaczerginski 28 October 1908 Vilna, Russian Empire |
| Died | 23 April 1954 (aged 45) Córdoba Province, Argentina |
| Occupation | Poet, writer, partisan |
| Language | Yiddish |
| Literary movement | Yiddish literature, Holocaust literature |
| Notable works | Tates, mames, kinderlekh |
| Spouse | Barbara Kaufman (1942–1943), Meri Szutan (1946-1954) |
| Children | 1 |
Shmaryahu "Shmerke" Kaczerginski (Yiddish: שמערקע קאַטשערגינסקי; 28 October 1908 – 23 April 1954) was a Yiddish poet, musician, writer and cultural activist. Born to a poor family in Vilna and orphaned at a young age, Kaczerginski was educated at the local Talmud Torah and night school, where he became involved in communist politics and was regularly beaten or imprisoned.
At the age of 15 he began publishing original songs and poetry, including Tates, mames, kinderlekh ("Fathers, mothers, children"), and soon began organising Yung-Vilne, a secular Jewish writing collective whose other members included Abraham Sutzkever and Chaim Grade. The Nazi invasion of Poland led to Kaczerginski's eventual imprisonment in the Vilna Ghetto, where he helped to hide Jewish cultural works with Sutzkever as part of the Paper Brigade and joined the United Partisans Organisation, participating in the failed Vilna Ghetto uprising and then escaping to the forest to fight with both the partisans and the Soviets.
After the expulsion of the Nazis from Vilna by the Soviet Army, Kaczerginski returned home to recover the hidden cultural works and founded the first post-Holocaust Jewish museum in Europe; he quickly became disenchanted with the Soviets and communism and developed into an ardent Zionist. After some time in Łódź, he moved to Paris with his second wife, Meri Szutan. In 1950 the family moved to Buenos Aires. Shmerke Kaczerginski was killed in a plane crash in Argentina in 1954, at the age of 45.
Renowned during his lifetime as a poet and writer, Kaczerginski dedicated much of his time after the start of the Second World War to collecting pre-war Yiddish songs and songs of the Holocaust in order to save Yiddishkeit from destruction. The author, editor or publisher of most of the first post-Holocaust songbooks, Kaczerginski was responsible for preserving over 250 Holocaust songs – the majority of those still known. Despite the enduring popularity of many of his own works, and the importance of his labours to researchers and Yiddish cultural activists, his early death has led to his relative anonymity.