ZVI PREIGERZON
Zvi Preigerzon was born on October 26, 1900, in the village of Shepetovka, Ukraine. From the time of his early childhood, he had already developed a profound love for the Hebrew language. "The Hebrew thrill has poisoned my blood forever" – he later wrote in one of his short stories. His early writings impressed the famous Hebrew poet Haim Nachman Bialik, who recommended that he be given a solid education in Hebrew. Following this advice, in 1913, young Zvi was sent by his parents to attend the Herzeliya Hebrew Gymnasium in Tel-Aviv, Palestine, where all classes were conducted in Hebrew. However, this period of his life lasted only one year. After falling ill, he was sent back home for the summer holidays, but could never return to his beloved school, as on August 14th, 1914 World War I broke out, and the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire (which occupied Palestine at the time) became enemies.
Preigerzon continued his education in Odessa, but he never relinquished his love for the Hebrew language. After the Communist Revolution of 1917, he faced a major dilemma: the choice between obtaining a higher education, which he so desired, or emigrating to Palestine. His decision would shape the rest of his life, as he chose to pursue his education, acquire a profession, and only then depart for Palestine – not knowing that very soon Stalin’s regime would make such a departure impossible. In 1920, Preigerzon moved to Moscow and was accepted into the Moscow Mining University and, in the course of time, he became one of the foremost coal-processing experts in the USSR. He and his family lived in Moscow from that time on.
However, Preigerzon’s engineering and scientific achievements were not what made him a memorable figure in Jewish culture – his primary passion was writing in the Hebrew language. Over the next fifteen years, his stories and poems were published in several Hebrew language journals and magazines in Europe. Later on, with the Hebrew language being banned by the USSR, the proponents of Jewish culture necessarily adopted Yiddish as their alternative language. These changes affected Jewish authors as they were required not only to switch their language of trade, but also to abide by Soviet literary regulations due to the harshly enforced rules of censorship in the Soviet Union. Preigerzon ignored these mandates and continued writing in Hebrew, giving his characters simple Jewish names and complicated Jewish problems. The stories were about people trapped in the reality of revolution, war, and the destruction of their religious and cultural traditions. With the beginning of the Great Stalin Purge in the 1930’s, contact with international entities became extremely dangerous, and Preigerzon was forced to stop mailing his stories and poems overseas, though he continued to write in secret.
After World War II, an important theme of Preigerzon’s stories became the Jewish Holocaust. Such literary activity was very risky, as the Stalin regime withheld information on Jewish suffering due to the increasing governmental anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. His writings also contained a greater amount of spirituality, which was not present in the author's works prior to the war. An example of this spirituality is found in the story "Shaddai" (1945), where a talisman with a Kabbalistic inscription becomes the key device in saving the life of a Jewish girl. The characters in his stories return to the faith of their forefathers when faced with war and terror.
On March 1, 1949, at the onset of the government's anti-Semitic campaign, Zvi Preigerzon was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in Gulag labor camps for his Hebrew writing and educational activities. While in the camp, Preigerzon became the center of Jewish life, and taught many of his fellow Jewish prisoners the Hebrew language, songs, and literature, along with Jewish traditions. After the renunciation of Stalin’s terror in 1956, Preigerzon was released from the Gulag, his conviction was revoked, and he was officially rehabilitated. He returned to Moscow, was reunited with his family, and continued his professional work as a scientist, along with his secret writings in Hebrew. At this time, he composed his “Memoirs of a Gulag Prisoner”, describing his own prison experiences, as well as those of many other Jewish people that he had met during his time in the Gulag.
In his personal life, Preigerzon kept in constant contact with his Jewish friends, and his home served as a center of the Hebrew-speaking community in Moscow. He enjoyed Hebrew and Yiddish culture, traditions, literature, music, and songs. For his literary works, Zvi Preigerzon interviewed a large number of Jewish people who had suffered the atrocities of Stalin and the Holocaust, which required a lot of courage and persistence on his part. Having learned an important lesson through his imprisonment, Preigerzon wrote his books in complete secrecy, to the extent that he even hid his works from his own family.
Although Preigerzon was physically removed from the Land of Israel, his heart was always there. He was constantly following the developments in the newly established State of Israel, listening to the “Voice of Israel” on a short-wave radio, and obtaining Hebrew publications from the Israeli Embassy. He was always perfecting his knowledge of the Hebrew language, using all the means available to him, and keeping himself updated on the new words and terms that were constantly appearing in the Modern Hebrew vocabulary. His knowledge of Jewish History was extensive, and in his writings he often used expressions, allegories, and metaphors from the Bible.
On March 15, 1969 Zvi Preigerzon died in Moscow of a heart attack. After his death, three more of his books were published in Hebrew in Israel. His works were warmly accepted by the Israeli literary community and found numerous readers. When the gates of the Soviet Union opened to Jewish emigration in the 1970’s, Preigerzon’s family – his wife Lea, his children Atalia, Nina, and Binyamin, and many of his grandchildren – emigrated to Israel. In accordance with his will, his remains were buried in Israel. His children were instrumental in promoting his legacy and in the translation of his works into Russian, thus giving many Russian-speaking readers the opportunity to appreciate his writing. In recognition of his literary accomplishments, a street in Tel-Aviv was named after him.
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