ABSTRACT
Along with such poets as David Hofshteyn and Leyb Kvitko, Peretz Markish is often categorized as a ‘Ukrainian’ Yiddish poet. In reality, Markish was considerably less Ukrainian-centred than many of his peers, though the Volhynia, where he was born, and Ukraine more generally do often appear as settings in his works. As a member of the literary circle around Albatros, the Warsaw ‘journal for the new poetic and artistic expression’, he co-authored the manifesto published in 1922 in the journal’s first issue, which inter alia stated that its signers had only temporarily fled from revolutionary Russia. Markish’s inspiration to write The Ghetto Uprising came from visiting Vilnius soon after its liberation from German occupation. However, he set his play in a fictional location, somewhere in the area that was part of Poland until September 1939, when the Red Army occupied it in accordance with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.
