The Rabbi, the Rebbetzin, and the Yiddish Poet

One of the foremost Yiddish poets in the decades following World War I, Peretz Markish was born in a Ukrainian shtetl, where his devout father worked as a teacher in a ḥeder. After leaving the Soviet Union in 1921, Markish returned eight years later, modifying his work somewhat to adhere to the party line and receiving accolades from a regime still interested in encouraging “proletarian” Jewish culture. At some point, he also crossed paths with Chana Schneerson (mother of the late Lubavitcher rebbe), whose husband was a prominent rabbi in the city of Dnepropetrovsk. Schneerson would later record the encounter in her memoirs, as Dovid Margolin writes: