One of the last books David Englestein read before dying at age 91 last month was a collection of Yiddish poems.
It was a fitting rite.
The San Francisco resident, a founder of the socialist Committees of Correspondence, was devoted to Yiddish language and culture throughout his life.
“It was his roots,” said Mary Englestein, his wife of 25 years. “He was born into the culture and really imbibed it intensely. He also loved the Bible. When I first met him, he always wanted to read to me the Song of Songs.”
Englestein, who died Dec. 18 in San Francisco of congestive heart failure, was born in Montreal to Hungarian immigrants who spoke only Yiddish — his father was a tailor, his mother a homemaker.
Raised in a religious home as one of six children, Englestein remained observant until saving enough money to attend Commonwealth College in Arkansas. There he found a new and consuming passion — the writings of Karl Marx and other socialists. Upon graduating, he remained at the college as an instructor.
In 1933, Englestein moved to Chicago, where he joined the Communist Party. He served as full-time director of the Chicago Worker’s School and taught classes in political economy, philosophy and labor history.
“He was really a broad-minded intellectual who had a tremendous variety of interests,” said Max Elbaum, an Oakland editor who met Englestein while organizing a Marxist scholars conference in 1984. “He was willing to look at all fields of human knowledge.”
Despite Englestein’s strong convictions, Elbaum added, “he was a very engaging and thoughtful person, the opposite of what one would consider dogmatic or doctrinaire.”
In 1969, Englestein moved to San Francisco, where he served as manager of the radical weekly newspaper People’s World and worked intermittently as a bookkeeper. In 1992, along with other Communists from Northern California, he left the party and helped found another socialist organization, the Committees of Correspondence.
Though he devoted himself to politics wholeheartedly, Englestein maintained a number of other interests, including music of the ’60s and ’70s.
“We went to the Rolling Stones concert in 1994,” reported Mary Englestein. “We were the oldest people in the whole stadium.”
Funeral plans for Englestein are pending.
In addition to his wife, Mary, of San Francisco, Englestein is survived by sons Richard Englestein and David Simkin of Berkeley, and brothers Morris of Montreal and Joe of Florida.