17 Facts About Shimon Markish

Shimon Markish was a classical scholar, literary and cultural historian, translator.

Shimon Markish was executed as one of the thirteen Soviet Jews on the Night of the Murdered Poets which marked the end of the "anti-cosmopolitan" campaign aiming to destroy Jewish cultural figures, leading personalities of the Jewish cultural life and former members of the Jewish Antifascist Committee.

Shimon Markish's mother was Esther Lazebnikova, a translator and publicist and his brother is David Markish, a writer and poet.

The Markish family spent the war in evacuation, in Chistopol and then in Tashkent.

Shimon Markish enrolled in the English department at Moscow State University, but in 1949, after his father's arrest, he decided to change to the small and "hidden" field of classical philology.

Shimon Markish's studies were interrupted by exile before his diploma: the family was arrested in January 1953 without having any news of the father.

In exile, Shimon Markish worked as a storekeeper, then taught at school a variety of subjects.

Shimon Markish returned to Moscow in the summer of 1954, married the translator Inna Bernstein, and they had a son, Mark.

Shimon Markish translated primarily from ancient Greek and Latin, but from English, German, sometimes under an assumed name, sometimes in collaboration with colleagues who found it difficult to work.

Shimon Markish worked on the theme "Erasmus and Jewry" but his next book on this topic was published only later, in 1979, in French, and in English.

Shimon Markish did not find a job, so he could not acquire a passport and could not leave the country to see his mother, who, in the meantime, had left the Soviet Union for Israel.

Shimon Markish was invited to join the new Russian department of the University of Geneva.

Shimon Markish worked at the Department of Russian in Geneva for 22 years, until his retirement in 1996.

Shimon Markish dedicated the greater part of his life to the research on Russian-Jewish literature, a subject that he established, promoted, and enriched as a field of research.

Shimon Markish wrote essays and books on major Russian-Jewish writers, notably Vassily Grossman, whose novel Life and Fate was smuggled to the West on microfilm of bad quality and read with difficulties by Markish and Efim Etkind for the publication.

Shimon Markish compiled several anthologies of works by Russian-Jewish writers.

In 1995, Shimon Markish was returned to Hungarian citizenship after being deprived of it in 1987, and in 1997 he became a Swiss citizen.