Benjamin Zuskin - biography

Benjamin Zuskin (Russian: Вениамин Зускин; ? 1899 - August 12, 1952) was a Jewish actor and director in Moscow State Jewish Theater. Zuskin had a title of the People's actor of the RSFSR. He was a laureate of the Stalin Prize in 1946.

Biography

Zuskin was born in the town of Ponevizh, Kovna Gubernya (today, Panevezys, Lithuania) in April 1899, a son of a tailor. He attended a cheder. Zuskin was admitted into a college in 1911. Following the April 1915 defeat of a Russian army at the hands of the German army, the Russian authorities considered ordered the mass deportation of Jews living in central Lithuania to the interior of the Russian Empire -- approximately 250,000 were expelled. The Zuskin family went to Penza, on the Europeans side of the Urals.  There he met and married the daughter of another deported family, Rachel Holand (in Russian, Goland).  In Penza, Benjamin continued his studies and took roles in a local theatre. In 1920, he became a student at the Sverdlovsk Geological Institute, but in 1921 he requested a transfer to the Moscow Geological Institute.  In that year, a daughter, Tamara, was born in Moscow.  Shortly afterwards, however, Benjamin and Rachel separated, and Rachel and Tamara moved to Rachel's home town, Ukmerge, Lithuania, and thereafter to Kaunas, Lithuania.  Tamara rejoined her father in Moscow in 1935.  Rachel, her second husband, and their three children remained in Kaunas.  All but one daughter In were killed in the Kovna ghetto, the urban concentration camp established by the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators in the Viliampole / Shlabodke neighborhood of Kaunas. Benjamin remarried in 1935 and had another daughter, Alla.  His second wife died in 1937.

Theatre life

Zuskin joined Moscow State Jewish Theater in 1921. In the same year Zuskin, together with Solomon Mikhoels, set on the stage a play "Sholom Aleichem's Party". In 1922 he played a major role in "Witch" by Abraham Goldfaden.

Accomplishments

Zuskin's performance blended with Alexander Granovsky's system of organic interrelation of a word and gesture, plastics and rhythm of movements. His characteristic features were light humor and romanticism which gave additional tints to a controversial life of Jewish hamlet of shtetl. His roles showed to the audience a quarry of talented people among their routine activities. Zuskin was a partner of Mikhoels until the latter's suspicious death in car accident in Minsk, in January 1948 when he became the Theater's artistic director. Since 1935 he was also teaching at the actors' studio at the Theater. His most famous role was that of the Fool in King Lear with Solomon Mikhoels in the title role.

Filmography

• Zuskin was a featured actor of Soviet movies.
• A Man from a Shtetl («Человек из местечка»), 1930.
• Happiness Hunters («Искатели счастья»), 1936.
• Unsubdued («Непокоренные»), 1945.

Execution

As a prominent member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, he was arrested at a hospital while being treated for nervous exhaustion and later executed on Stalin's orders in the event known as the Night of the Murdered Poets on August 12, 1952.