The American Yiddish Daily Forverts on Privation in Soviet Ukraine: Experiences and Reflections

This article focuses on two journalists who in the early 1930s wrote in the Yiddish-language newspaper Forverts (Forward) about the famine on 1932–33 in Ukraine. Both Mendel Osherowitch and Harry (Herts) Lang were born in the Russian Empire and emigrated to the United States as young men. Forverts was established in 1897 as a voice of the socialist labour movement and later became a bitter critic of the Soviet regime and of Communism. The majority of Forverts readers were immigrants from the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union was a focus of its coverage. Osherowitch in the spring of 1932 and Lang in the fall of 1933 traveled to Ukraine during trips to the USSR. While the life of Soviet Jews was their primary interest, both described starvation in the villages of Ukraine. Osherowitch’s articles were serialized in Forverts from April to August 1932 and appeared in book form in January 1933. Lang’s account was published in twenty-five instalments in the winter of 1932–33. It would cause a stir in April 1935 after being reprinted in English translation in revised form in the New York Evening Journal, whose publisher, William Randolph Hearst, sought to use these revelations to attack Roosevelt’s policy.