מקור השם שוורצברד

Soldier and poet

Jsmail, the city of his birth, had a history of anti-Jewish riots and during the abortive 1905 revolution, Schwarzbard helped to organize Jewish self-defense when pogroms broke out. A watchmaker by trade, he had anarchist sympathies and had to leave his home in 1906, eventually settling in Paris. In World War I he fought in the French Foreign Legion. After the Bolshevik Revolution, he hurried back to the Ukraine to organize an international battalion to fight against the White Russians and the Cossack marauders of Semyon Petlyura who were responsible for murderous pogroms in which at least 50,000 Jews died, including many of his close relatives. Returning to Paris, Schwarzbard published a volume of Yiddish poems. Learning that Petlyura had transferred his Ukrainian government-in-exile to Paris, he tracked him down and shot him dead in 1926. After a sensational trial, in which he passionately defended himself, he was acquitted. He wrote memoirs and accounts of the Russian revolution.