MEYTE LIVSHITS

MEYTE LIVSHITS (ca. 1889-November 1, 1918)

            He was born in Glukhov (Hluchiv), Chernigov (Chernihiv) district, Ukraine.  He graduated from a Russian high school.  Around 1910 he moved to the United States and went on to graduate from the Pratt Institute for Librarians in Brooklyn.  He then worked in the Russian book division in the Chatham Square Branch of the New York Public Library, and later he moved to the Seward Park Library branch which was then a center of New York Jewish life.  He gave public lectures there and also invited as guest speakers prominent Yiddish writers to give lectures on Yiddish literature and general Jewish cultural issues.  With Khayim Liberman, he translated from Russian chapters from Shimen Dubnov’s history of the Jews, and it was used as a textbook: Di yidishe geshikhte far shule un folk (Jewish history for school and general populace [original: Istorii︠a︡ evreiskogo naroda na vostoke (History of the Jewish people in the East)]) (New York: Maks N. Mayzel, 1915-1917) in 3 volumes: vol. 1 “Biblishe epokhe” (Biblical period); vol. 2 “Makabeyishe un talmudishe epokhe” (Maccabee and Talmudic period), 181 pp.; vol. 3 “Der mitlalter un di naye tsayt” (Middle Ages and modern times), 248 pp.  He died at age twenty-nine during the epidemic of the Spanish influenza in New York.

Sources: Z. Vaynper, in Idishe shriftshteler (New York) 1 (1933), p. 79; information from Khayim Liberman in New York.

Khayim Leyb Fuks