Revekka Galperina

Revekka Galperina was born in 1894 in Edineț, which was then part of the Russian Empire and is now within the Republic of Moldova. Her parents were the Jewish writer and merchant Menashe Galperin (1871–1960) and Tema Naftulovna Kormanskaia (1872–1941). Her father worked in the grain trade, and his father had been an industrialist from Khmelnytskyi in what is now Ukraine, while her mother's father had been a Bessarabian grain merchant.

Galperina was educated at home by private tutors, and her family moved frequently throughout her youth. She eventually settled in Moscow, where she worked as an editor at the Foreign Languages Publishing House.

One of the most prolific Soviet translators, she produced dozens of translations into Russian of famous literary works. The translations were popular among readers and were frequently reprinted, some as many as 50 times.[2][3] Though she primarily translated from English and German, she spoke as many as twelve languages.[4] Authors translated by Galperina include Robert Sheckley, James Fenimore Cooper, Franz Kafka, Jack London, O. Henry, Hans Fallada, E. T. A. Hofmann, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Fühmann, Hans Erich Nossack, Adalbert Stifter, Stefan Zweig, Dieter Noll, Anna Seghers, Theodore Dreiser, Heinrich Mann, William Makepeace Thackeray, Mark Twain, Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Sinclair Lewis.[5][6]

Galperia was married twice. Her first husband was Pawel Nikolajewitsch Mostowenko (1881–1938), who served as rector of Bauman Moscow State Technical University from 1927 to 1930.[3][7] They had two children: Aleksandr Mostovenko (1921–1942), who died on the front during World War II, and Natalia Mostovenko. Her second husband was the musicologist Georgy Nikitich Khubov (1902–1981), an Honoured Cultural Worker of the RSFSR,[4] with whom she had a son, Nikita Georgievich Khubov, in 1936.