Moyshe Kulbak (1896–1937) was a Yiddish poet, novelist, and dramatist. The Zelmenyaners was written and published in Minsk between 1929 and 1935, the heyday of short-lived cultural renaissance. Arrested in 1937 in the wave of Stalinist repression that hit the Minsk Yiddish writers and cultural activists with particular vehemence, and given a perfunctory show trial, Kulbak was shot on October 29 at the age of 41. Hillel Halkin is the New York Times bestselling author of Letters to an American-Jewish Friend: A Zionist Polemic and Across the Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel.
