Peretz Davidovich Markish (Yiddish: פּרץ מאַרקיש ) (Russian: Перец Давидович Маркиш) (December 7, 1895 - August 1952) was a Soviet/Russian Jewish poet and playwright who wrote in Yiddish.
Peretz Markish was born in Polonnoye in 1895. His distant ancestors lived in Spain. As a child he attended a cheder and sang in the choir of the local synagogue. He served as a private in the Russian Imperial Army during World War I. In the early 1920s, he was a member of the Kiev group of Yiddish poets together with Leib Kvitko. Markish wrote numerous poems and plays, as well as several novels. In 1946, he was awarded the Stalin Prize. Some of his poems were translated into Russian by Anna Akhmatova. He lived in Berlin, Paris, London, Warsaw and Rome before returning to Russia.
Markish was a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. He was a victim of the Night of the Murdered Poets. Accused of being a "Jewish nationalist" and an enemy of the Soviet regime, he was executed in 1952. [1] Markish in one of the three heros, with his fellow Yiddish poets Uri-Zvi Grynberg and Melekh Ravitsh, of Gilles Rozier's novel D'un pays sans amour (Grasset, Paris, 2011)