Alexander Isaakovich Gelman, original given name Shunya, is a Bessarabian-born Soviet and Russian playwright, writer, and screenwriter. A survivor of the Holocaust during childhood, Gelman became a playwright and screenwriter after working as a newspaper journalist in Leningrad in the 1960s, winning the USSR State Prize in 1976. He has resided in Moscow since 1978.
A supporter of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, Gelman was elected to the Supreme Soviet of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1989 and to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union upon Mikhail Gorbachev's recommendation in 1990, before leaving the Communist Party of the Soviet Union less than a year later.
After the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, the occupying German forces deported the Gelman family to the Bershad ghetto in Transnistria, where his mother died. Only Alexander Gelman and his father (from 14 deported members) survived a death march upon leaving the camp near the end of the war.
In 1966 he moved to Leningrad, where he worked as a journalist for the municipal newspapers Smena (The Work Shift) and Stroitelny Rabochy (Construction Worker).
In 1970 he co-authored a screenplay (with his future wife Tatyana Pavlovna Kaletskaya). It was later filmed as Night Shift. The next screenplay, also together with Tatiana, led to the movie Xenia, Wife of Fyodor (Lenfilm, 1974), which won an award in a USSR-wide competition.
His career reached an early peak with the 1974 play Protokol odnogo zasedaniya (Minutes of a Meeting, also translated as A Party Committee Meeting) and staged in Leningrad at the Gorky Bolshoi Drama Theater by Georgy Tovstonogov and a year later at the Moscow Art Theatre by Oleg Yefremov; it was filmed in 1975 as Premiya (Salary Bonus). It depicted a construction crew's rejection of a salary bonus on the grounds that they felt cheated by bad management and poor workplace organization. Acclaimed as a sociological drama, the film won director Sergey Mikaelyan and screenwriter Gelman the USSR State Prize in 1976. Many people called Protokol odnogo zasedaniya prophetic, "presaging the strikes of summer 1980 and the workers' movement in Poland.
Other plays are Obratnaya svyaz' [Feedback] (1976), My, nizhepodpisavshiesya [We, the undersigned] (1979), Skameika [The bench] (1983), Zinulya (1984), and Poslednee budushchee [The most recent future] (2010).
Portrait courtesy of Henschel Schauspiel
