Dates of death for J. M. Shirazi and others

[BobC]

Alex ,

You may be interested to know I found this marriage record for what looks like J K M Shirazi :

Name Joel Kasha Mooshy Shirazi
Birth Date 1876
Age 40
Spouse's Name Eugenie Rosenstein
Spouse's Birth Date 1887
Spouse's Age 29
Event Date 11 Sep 1916
Event Place Congregational Church, Alexandroffsky, St. Petersburg, Russia
Father's Name Mooshy Shirazi
Spouse's Father's Name Isaac Rosenstein
Marital Status Single
Spouse's Marital Status Single

The first names look right for your J K M.

The record is found in what is known as the England and Wales Non-Conformist Record Indexes (RG4-8) so even though it took place in St Petersburg there is some sort of English connection.

It turns out that the church was known as the British and American Congregational Church, probably the only non-Orthodox church in the city.

In 1911 his wife-to-be Eugenie was a student at a girls school in Chipping Barnett, Hertfordshire. She is shown as born in Russia.

So if Shirazi lived in St Peterburg for some time it could explain the Russian connection that would allow him to to translate Gorky.

BobC

[BobC]

So if Joel was the translator of Gorky and was born in 1876 then if still alive he would be 71 in 1947 (for the 70 year rule).

Not an infeasible age, but locating a death record for him if he lived in Russia would be difficult.

BobC

[AlexBell]

Many thanks for your help - I haven't been online for a few days, so haven't see your posts till now. In the introduction to the Life of Omar Khayyami by the same author he wrote that he was Persian, so it looks like it was the same man.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by BobC

So if Joel was the translator of Gorky and was born in 1876 then if still alive he would be 71 in 1947 (for the 70 year rule).

Right. And if his heirs or copyright holders show up and ask us to remove his works, we'll quickly do so. Until then, in the best faith, we treat the works as public domain.

The situation would be slightly different in the US. As works published before 1923, they are public domain regardless of their author's date of death. If they were published later, at least in some circumstances the term could be 120 years after publication.

Nice research, by the way. We still have many authors/translators/illustrators of whom we know nothing but--if lucky--the name.

[BobC]

Personally I think the likelihood of his surviving are unlikely.

He was an Author (and therefore one of the "intelligentsia") and married to a (much younger) Russian wife, educated at a boarding school in England. This is at the start of the Russian Revolution.

He probably wouldn't be able to leave the country if he wanted - his wife's roots seem to be there.

Would he have survived Stalin's purges of the 1930's ?

Much of this falls into the category "absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence" .

At least we now have a fuller name and a better understanding of why someone who thought of himself as Persian would be translating Gorky's work from Russian into English.

By the way : https://archive.org/details/adventuresofduns00dunsrich covers some of the events in Persia/Iran towards the end of WW1 and the Russian involvement during the Russian Revolution.

BobC