Eli Schechtman (or Shekhtman or Shechtman) (; September 8, 1908 – January 1, 1996) was a Yiddish writer. He defined the purpose of his work as follows: "My mission in Jewish literature was and still is ... to show to those who negate the power of the Galut, how mighty – spiritually and physically – were the generations who grew up in that Galut, even in the most godforsaken places."
In March 1953, several days before the official announcement of Stalin's death, Eli Schechtman was imprisoned as a Jewish nationalist and charged with espionage and Zionism. He was released several months after Stalin's death due to "lack of evidence of guilt".
Schechtman lived and worked in Israel from 1972 until his death in 1996.
Biography
Eli Schechtman was born in the shtetl of Vas'kovychi Korestensky district near Zhytomyr in the Ukraine. He was the seventh of eight children in his family. He received traditional Jewish education at a cheder. Eli Sсhechtman's mother died when he was eight years old, and his father took care of the children. Eli was forced to leave for Zhytomyr to study in a yeshiva at the age of thirteen.
In 1926, Eli Schechtman went to Odesa – a large intellectual center of Jewish life of that time – where he studied literature at the Odesa Jewish Pedagogical Institute from 1929 to 1932.
Marriage
In 1929 Schechtman met Sheindl (Zhenia) Magazinnik, an actress in a Jewish theater got married and in 1932 moved to Kharkiv, and later in 1936 to Kyiv. In 1934 Schechtman joined the Union of Soviet Writers as an active member, where his acceptance was sanctioned by Maxim Gorky, who was the chairman of the Union. During the 1930s Schechtman wrote three novels, all of which were published in Yiddish. He also translated the works of Ukrainian novelists to Yiddish. .
World War II
On the day following the Nazi's attack on the USSR, and the bombing of Kyiv, Eli Schechtman, and his family were evacuated to Uzbekistan. In 1942 Schechtman voluntarily joined the Red Army. He was injured in 1944, but returned to the front line, and fought as an officer in the Russian army until the end of the war. In May 1945 he was part of the Russian forces who marched to Berlin, and in 1946-1948 he served near Weimar as the Cultural Attaché of the Soviet Forces.
Imprisonment
In 1948 Schechtman left Germany and returned to the USSR. Between 1948 and 1962, the Schechtman's family lived in Kyiv in a communal apartment with 16 neighbours. He couldn't publish his novels and the family struggled to survive, supported only by Sheindl's modest salary as a kindergarten teacher. In March 1953, several days before the official announcement of Stalin's death, Eli Schechtman was imprisoned as Jewish nationalist and charged with espionage and Zionism. He was released several months after Stalin's death due to "lack of evidence of guilt".
Last years in the Soviet Union
Upon his release from the Soviet prison, Eli Schechtman began working on one of his major novels, Erev, despite the fact that at that time in the USSR there was not a single magazine, nor a single newspaper or publishing house in Yiddish. This epic novel, the first Yiddish novel in the USSR, written and published after Stalin's death, became the central work of his literary career. A number of critics praised it as one of the best, or even the best, achievement of post-Holocaust Yiddish prose.
Israel
In 1972 Eli Schechtman and with his wife emigrated to Israel. In 1973 he became the first author to receive an award from the Prime Minister of Israel, Golda Meir, "for literary work in Yiddish." In 1975 a Hebrew translation of the first four parts of Erev were published.
Eli settled in Jerusalem and began to struggle with the attitude to Yiddish - the language of most Holocaust victims - as to a foreign language in the Jewish state. In the 1980s and 1990s, he became even more critical to the historical and cultural approach of the Israeli establishment to the European diaspora and its culture. Although Schechtman was honored by several Israeli literary awards, he was dispirited by the status of the Yiddish language in Israel and generally remained suspended from the circle of local Yiddish writers. In 1991, Eli Schechtman, protesting the situation of Yiddish in Israel, refused to get involved in a two-volume Anthology of Yiddish poets and writers (who had ever lived in Israel), whose purpose was to give a complete picture of the Yiddish literature in the country.