By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — Samuel Marshak (1887 – 1964) was the most beloved children’s writer in the USSR. He was highly appreciated in the Soviet Union: he was awarded the country’s most important prizes: Laureate of the Lenin Prize (1963) and four Stalin Prizes (1942, 1946, 1949, 1951). He was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor and the Order of Lenin.
His poems were enjoyed by all Soviet children. Marshak’s poetry for children is a world of goodness, fun, fairy tales, original images and ringing, beautiful rhymes. He was an innovator, the creator of energetic, major, fast, inventive, cheerful and witty children’s verse. The poet owned and developed the imagination of the child. His poetic, romantic children’s world was an alternative to the brutal bloody prose of the Soviet state socialist “realism”.
However, Marshak was not only an outstanding children’s poet, but also a brilliant translator of English poetry into Russian. He masterfully translated Shakespeare, Blake, Keats, Kipling and Burns. He was particularly successful in translating Shakespeare’s sonnets and Burns’ poetry. For his translations from Robert Burns, he was made honorary president of the Robert Burns World Federation in Scotland in 1960.
Marshak lived two lives: 30 years before the Bolshevik October Revolution and 46 years after it. These were very different lives. The second life forced him to carefully conceal many events of the first life.
The surname Marshak is an acronym of the Hebrew phrase Morenu Rabbi Shmuel Kaidanover (“Our teacher Rebbe Shmuel Kaidanover”). Samuel was born on November 3, 1887 in the Voronezh sloboda of Chizhovka to a Jewish family. At the age of six, he began to learn Hebrew. His father Yakov was a native of the town of Kaidanov, which is mentioned in the abbreviation of his surname. This surname showed that Marshak’s ancestors were Talmudists, that is, interpreters of the sacred Jewish books.
Marshak was the eighth generation of a famous Talmudist of the seventeenth century. Samuel’s father Yakov worked as a foreman at the Mikhailov brothers’ soap factory; his mother was a housewife. Six children grew up in the family. In 1900 the family moved to the town of Ostrogozhsk near Voronezh.
In 1899-1906 Samuel studied at the Ostrogozhsk, 3rd Petersburg and Yalta gymnasiums. In the gymnasium, the teacher of literature instilled in him a love for classical poetry and encouraged the first literary experiences of the future poet, considering him a prodigy. His writings fell to the famous literary critic Vladimir Stasov, who was delighted with the boy’s literary talent and helped him transfer to a gymnasium in St. Petersburg. In 1907, Marshak published a collection of Zionides, devoted to Jewish themes, one of whose poems (Over the open grave) was written on the death of the “father of Zionism” Theodor Herzl. He also translated several poems by Chaim Nachman Bialik from Yiddish and Hebrew.
In 1911, together with his friend, the poet Yakov Godin, and a group of Jewish youth, he made a long journey through the Middle East: from Odessa they sailed by ship to Turkey, Greece, Syria and Palestine. Marshak went there as a correspondent of the St. Petersburg General Newspaper and the Blue Journal. Under the influence of what he saw, he created a cycle of poems under the general title Palestine. For some time, he lived in Jerusalem. He was also the author of Zionist poems.
On this trip he met Sophia Milvidsky, whom he married shortly after his return. At the end of September 1912, the newlyweds traveled to Great Britain. There Marshak studied first at the polytechnic, then – at the University of London (1912-1914). In London he studied, art, linguistics and English language history. During vacations, he traveled a lot on foot in England, listening to English folk songs. Even then Marshak began to work on translations of English ballads, which later made him famous.
In 1914 Marshak returned to Russia, worked in the provinces, published his translations in the magazines Severnye Zapiski and Russkaya Mysl’. In January 1917 he moved with his family to Petrograd (new name for St. Petersburg), but after the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution he fled to the south, where the Reds were not, – to Yekaterinodar, where he collaborated in the newspaper Utro Yuga as editorial director and staff feuilletonist. There he published poems and anti-Bolshevik feuilletons, Satires and Epigrams (1919). In addition to the Bolsheviks, Marshak ridiculed right-wingers and antisemites.
By 1920, Marshak had reworked all of his early poems, throwing out everything related to Judea. From the Concise Jewish Encyclopedia, we know: ‘In 1920, the most promising poet, Marshak, left Russian-Jewish literature…’. The Jewish poet died and the Soviet poet was born. In 1922 he returned to Petrograd (new name for St. Petersburg), and in 1923 he published his first poetry children’s books. For several years he headed the Leningrad editorial office of the Children’s State Publishing House.
In 1934, at the First Congress of Soviet Writers, he made a report on children’s literature and was elected a member of the board of the USSR Writers’ Union. In 1937, the children’s publishing house in Leningrad created by Marshak was crushed. Its best pupils were repressed at different times.
In 1938 Marshak moved to Moscow. In 1939-1947 he was a deputy of the Moscow City Council of Workers’ Deputies.
During World War II, Marshak began to live a double life. He secretly translated ghetto folk songs about the horrors of Nazism from Yiddish into Russian. The entirety of these ghetto songs in his translations was never published. Despite the antisemitic Soviet officialdom, Marshak could not forget about the Jewish theme, – he took an active part in the activities of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which emerged during the war, and whose destruction by the authorities began in 1948.
In 1946, Marshak led a secret campaign to raise money to ferry Jewish children from the Jewish orphanage in Kaunas. These were children who had miraculously survived in the Baltics during the war. They were sent to Warsaw, from there to London, and from London to Israel.
In 1948, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was dissolved and many of its members were arrested. Marshak’s name was repeatedly mentioned during interrogations of the committee members and appeared in the protocols. However, he was not touched yet. Marshak lived in constant tension: friends disappeared, anonymous calls were made to his apartment, he was threatened. There were attacks against the Commission on Children’s Literature, which was headed by Marshak.
There appeared a directive On the ballast in the writers’ organization. Not surprisingly, the “ballast” turned out to be writers of Jewish nationality, members of the children’s publishing house. Commissions often came to the publishing house with endless inspections. It was then that the chairman of one of them showed the staff “the true face of Marshak” – threw a book of Zionides on the table. In the late 40’s, Marshak’s name was on one of the firing lists. Stalin, who loved his poems, seeing his name, said: “Well, why shoot Marshak? In my opinion, this is a good writer.” And moved him to the list of those awarded the Stalin Prize. Marshak was proclaimed a classic of Soviet children’s literature. But he carefully concealed the biblical, Jewish, and Zionist themes in his work.
All his life, Marshak dreamed of translating into Russian the 136th Psalm of David. He repeatedly undertook this work, but each time he cried and put it off, never completing it, for there were the words: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, my right hand shall forget me; my tongue shall stick to my throat, if I do not remember thee, if I do not make Jerusalem the head of my joy.”
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Alex Gordon is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education, and the author of 11 books.