Yiddish Cosmopolitanism vs. Comintern-style Post-Imperialism: Peretz Hirshbein in Russian and Ukrainian Translations, 1928-1930

Peretz Hirshbein (1880-1948), prose writer, dramatist, and essayist, was one of the most distinctive voices of Yiddish literature in the first half of the 20th century. He is also known as a globe-trotter who traveled to all the major “must-see” points of South and North America, Oceania, Africa, and Asia. These travels, which lasted about 20 years and were described in detail in numerous travelogues, made him famous as the mysterious “flying Dutchman” of Yiddish literature. Without going into the cultural significance of these journeys, I will focus only on one aspect of them that has hitherto been neglected, namely his Russian and Ukrainian translations published in the USSR in 1928-1930.