Perets Markish

Peretz Markish
Left to right: Moishe Broderzon, Peretz Markish, Alter Kacyzne
Born	Peretz Davidovich Markish 7 December 1895 (25 November OS) Polonne, Volyn Governorate, Russian Empire
Died	12 August 1952 Lubyanka Prison, Moscow, Soviet Union
Nationality	Russian

Peretz Davidovich Markish (Yiddish: פּרץ מאַרקיש ‎) (Russian: Перец Давидович Маркиш) (7 December 1895 (25 November OS) – 12 August 1952) was a Soviet/Russian Jewish poet and playwright who wrote predominantly in Yiddish.

Peretz Markish was born in 1895 in Polonne, the Russian Empire (now Ukraine) to a Sephardi Jewish family. As a child he attended a cheder and sang in the choir of the local synagogue. He served as a private in the Russian Imperial Army during World War I. He was discharged from the army after the Russian Revolution, and settled in Ekaterinoslav (now Dnipropetrovsk), Ukraine. In 1918, he relocated to Kiev.

Markish’s first poetry collection, Shveln ("Thresholds"), published in Kiev in 1919, established his reputation. His poetry cycle Di kupe ("The Heap"; 1921) was written in response to the Ukrainian pogroms of 1919–20.

In the early 1920s, he was a member of the Kiev group of Yiddish poets that included David Hofstein and Leib Kvitko. After a series of pogroms took place in Ukraine, he moved to Warsaw and in Western Europe. While in Warsaw, he co-edited with I. J. Singer the expressionist literary anthology Khalyastre ("Gang"; 1922). Uri Zvi Grinberg and Melech Ravitch edited other literary publications. A second and final volume of Khalyastre, edited with Oser Varshawski, appeared in Paris in 1924 with a cover illustration by Marc Chagall. In 1924 he was a co-founder and editor of the Literarishe bleter in Warsaw.