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Meyerovich Daniel (1900-1940)

Personal data
SurnameMeyerovich
NameDaniel
Birth year1900
Death year1940
Death placeNorth
SexM

Daniel M. (pseudonym; real name Daniel Meyerovich (Meerowitch); 1900, Dvinsk – 1940, North Caucasus) — prose writer and dramatist.

Daniel M. wrote in Yiddish. He was educated in a cheder but left home early to earn a living. From 1917 he lived in the Urals, and from 1921 in Moscow. Around 1924, he graduated from the Faculty of Philology of the Second Moscow University. That same year, he began publishing. His early work shows some influence of Boris Pilnyak.

Daniel’s novellas Afn shvel (“On the Threshold”, 1928), which explores the role of the artist in the revolution, and Yulis (1930), portraying the tragic fate of the Vilna Workers’ Council in 1919, brought him recognition. His stage adaptation of Yulis, titled Fir teg (“Four Days”, 1932), was performed by the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre (GOSET) and numerous other Jewish theatres, including some in the United States.

Soviet critics, however, harshly attacked Daniel for presenting the tragic, as well as the heroic, dimensions of revolutionary struggle. His plays Zyamke Kopach (1936; Russian translation 1937) and Derfinder un komediant (Yohann Gutenberg) (“The Inventor and the Comedian”, 1937; Russian translation 1938) were staged by both Jewish and Russian children’s theatres. His play Shlomo Maimon was published posthumously in 1941.