He was born in
Korostyshiv, near
Kyiv, and received a traditional
Jewish education; his application to the
Kiev University was declined. Hofshteyn began to write in Yiddish,
Hebrew,
Russian, and
Ukrainian. His sister
Shifra Kholodenko also became a poet. After the
October Revolution, which he welcomed, Hofshteyn wrote only in Yiddish. He was coeditor of the
Moscow Yiddish monthly
Shtrom, the last organ of free Jewish expression in the
Soviet Union. The poems in which he acclaimed the communist regime established him as one of the
Kiev triumvirate of Yiddish poets, along with
Leib Kvitko and
Peretz Markish. Hofshteyn's elegies for Jewish communities devastated by the
White movement pogroms appeared in 1922, with illustrations by
Marc Chagall. Both had worked together as teachers at shelter for Jewish boys in suburban
Malakhovka, which housed and employed boys orphaned by Ukrainian pogroms. Hofshteyn protested the banning of Hebrew and the persecution of Hebrew writers, arousing the suspicion of the authorities. He therefore emigrated first to Germany and then to
Palestine in 1923. In Palestine, he wrote both in Hebrew and Yiddish and published in Yiddish the dramatic poem ''Sha'ul–Der Letster Meylekh fun Yisroel
(Saul–The Last King of Israel
, 1924) and an expressionistic drama Meshiekhs Tsaytn
(Messianic Times'', 1925). He returned to Kyiv in 1926 only to find himself compelled to write poems adulatory of the
Communist Party. In 1939, Hofshteyn became a member of the Communist Party. Hofshteyn hailed the establishment of the
State of Israel in 1948; however, in the same year, when
Joseph Stalin withdrew his support for Israel, Hofshteyn was arrested, together with Kvitko, Markish and other members of the
Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, first transported to Moscow and then to
Siberia. He was executed on the
Night of the Murdered Poets (August 12–13, 1952), together with twelve other Yiddish writers and artists. After the death of Stalin, they were
posthumously rehabilitated, and Hofshteyn's selected works reappeared in a Russian translation in 1958. ==See also==