Ezekiel Dobrushin, noted Yiddish author and literary critic, who is 70 years old, and who “disappeared” several years ago from Moscow together with other prominent Jewish writers and cultural leaders, is being held in the Soviet camp at Abes, in the Arctic Circle, it was reported in a Vienna newspaper today.
The report comes from Dr. Raphael Spann, of Vienna, who returned a few weeks ago from Abes, where he discovered Dobrushin in the camp hospital suffering from a heart ailment and from an advanced case of tuberculosis of the bone. Writing in “Die Wochen-Presse” of Vienna, Dr. Spann relates:
“In the evening, after the physicians and nurses left and movement in the hospital barracks slowed down, this 70-year-old man had been telling us his story. He spoke In Russian. He never learned German. “I didn’t want to spoil my Yiddish,” he said. And then we heard, sometimes with amazement, sometimes with indignation, the detailed reports of the scholarly Dobrushin about the systematic persecutions of Jews in the Soviet Union.
“The first example is Dobrushin himself. For decades he was an enthusiastic Communist. He was, with Ilya Ehrenberg, among the leaders of the Jewish anti-fascist Communists who sought to win the Jews outside of the USSR for the cause of Communism. In a vitriolic article he once damned “the American hate-mongering journalists” and their reports about anti-Jewish persecutions in Russia. A few days after the article was published he was seized by agents of the NKVD because he was a Jew. But he was not the only one.
“The entire Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was arrested, with one exception, Ilya Ehrenberg, whose propaganda value was still too important. The examining judge, however, showed Dobrushin a briefcase full of papers. He said: “This is the indictment. Ilya Ehrenberg is also involved. We shall not permit you to establish ‘the Jewish State in the Crimea.'” This was the fantastic accusation under which Dobrushin was arrested and sentenced. While in prison Dobrushin met Mrs. Molotov, wife of the present Russian Foreign Minister. (Mrs. Molotov was permitted to return to Moscow after Stalin’s death.)
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
