Tamara Gabbe

Tamara G. Gabbbe (1903-1960) - Soviet writer, translator, folklorist, playwright, editor and literary critic. He is the author of popular fairy-tale plays for children (“The City of Masters, or the Tale of Two Humpbacks”, “Avdotya-Ryazanochka”, “The Glass Slipper”, “Tin Rings” (“Magic Almanzor Rings”) and others). Tamara Gabbe was born on March 16, 1903 in the family of a military doctor, a baptized Jew, Grigory Mikhailovich and his wife, Evgenia Samoilovna. Father’s grandfather, Mikhail Yakovlevich, a native of Vilna province, was a famous medalist of the St. Petersburg Mint. Grigory Mikhailovich Germanized his last name, adding to it an extra letter “b”. Together with his father, his family moved to the places of his service, held in Finland. His last destination was Vyborg. In Vyborg, Grigory Mikhailovich died and was buried in the local Sorvalsk cemetery. Evgenia Samoilovna married again - the dentist Solomon Markovich Gurevich, who managed to become a close friend of Tamara. Tamara successfully studied at the Vyborg women's gymnasium, studied German, Swedish and French. After the separation of Finland, in December 1917, the Gurevich family moved to Petrograd. In 1924, Tamara entered the literary department of the Leningrad Institute of Art History. Here in the winter of 1924–1925, she met her Lydia Chukovskaya, Alexandra Lyubarskaya and Zoya Zadunaiskaya, and the friendship that the four of them began continued throughout their lives. After graduating from the institute in 1930, Tamara worked for some time as a teacher, then went to work as an editor in the children's department of the State Publishing House, headed by S. Ya. Marshak. She married an engineer, Iosif Izrailevich Ginzburg. In 1941, in the spring, Ginzburg will be sentenced to forced labor for 5 years, and in 1945 he will tragically perish when the dam is broken. In 1930, her first book, Memoirs of an American Schoolboy, was published. In the following, in 1931, a paraphrase was published for younger schoolchildren of Jonathan Swift's novel “Gulliver's Travels” (co-author Z. Zadunayskaya). In 1937, the editors of the Leningrad Children’s Publishing House were crushed and ceased to exist. Some employees (including L. K. Chukovskaya) were dismissed, others, including Tamara Gabbe, were arrested. In 1938 she was released. During World War II, she remained in besieged Leningrad, lost her home and loved ones there. In 1942, she and her mother managed to leave Leningrad and move to Moscow. The younger brother Michael will die from wounds in the spring of 1943 For seven years, Tamara was a nurse at the bedside of her hopelessly ill mother. After the war she lived in Moscow. In recent years, she has been incurably ill (stomach cancer, liver cancer). She died on March 2, 1960. She was buried in Moscow, at the Novodevichy Cemetery (station No. 5) together with her mother E. S. Gabbe-Gurevich and her stepfather S. M. Gurevich (the author of the monument on the grave is M. R. Gabbe).