Autograph. Fast G. General Washington and the Water Witch. The play. In English.

Autograph. Fast G. General Washington and the Water Witch. The play. In English.
Typescript. 85 l . Size 21.5 x 27.5 cm. The corner of the cover is lost, minor tears.

The recipient of the autograph is Boris Romanovich Izakov (1903 – 1988), the writer's translator.

Howard Fast (1914-2003). Fast was born in New York. His mother, Ida (nee Miller), was a British Jewish immigrant, and his father, Barney Fast, was a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant who, upon arrival in America, shortened his surname from Fastovsky. When his mother died in 1923 and his father was out of work, Howard's younger brother, Julius, moved in with relatives while he and his older brother Jerome sold newspapers. Howard attributed his early addiction to reading to working part-time at the New York Public Library. He was a member of the Communist Party of the USA for about 13 years. For his "anti-American activities" he was blacklisted by publishers. In the Soviet Union, the writer's works were widely welcomed. The play "General Washington and the Water Witch" was staged on the stage of the Theater of the Russian Army. But after Fast broke with international communism in 1957 and left the party, the Soviet government changed its attitude, and the writer's works were under an unspoken ban.

Boris Romanovich Izakov (1903 – 1988) – writer, journalist, translator. He began his career in the 20s of the last century as an editor of the All-Union newspaper "Batrak". In 1931, he was appointed a correspondent of Pravda in London, and was one of the first foreign journalists of this newspaper to work in the UK. Boris Izakov has devoted more than 60 years to writing and journalism, and 30 years of them he worked in the publishing house of the newspaper Pravda. Author of the journalistic books "In our romantic age" and "Flying years, distant lands ...", translator of works by a number of foreign writers. In the last years of his life, Boris Romanovich Izakov worked as the head of the department, a member of the editorial board of the journal "USA – Economics, Politics, Ideology", published by the Institute of the United States and Canada of the Academy of Sciences of the Russian Federation.