'What Are You Selling There – Despair?'

The Night of the Murdered Poets took place on August 12, 1952. Thirteen literary and intellectual figures were murdered on Stalin’s orders in the basement of Lubyanka Prison in Moscow. Four were poets who wrote in Yiddish – Perets Markish , Leyb Kvitko, Dovid Hofshteyn, and Itsik Feffer -- and a fifth, David Bergelson, was a Yiddish novelist. All were Jews – “rootless cosmopolitans,” to use…