Moshe Altman

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Mosche (Moses) Altman (born May 8, 1890 in Lipcany ; † October 21, 1981 in Chernivtsi ) was a Russian Yiddish writer.

Life

Altman came from a family of craftsmen. He attended the Jewish elementary school in his hometown, then until 1908 the grammar school in Kamjanez-Podilskyj .

In 1914 he published his first poems in the Odessa Yiddish newspaper “Unser lebn” . Since then he has published a lot in Yiddish press, mainly as a narrator and playwright. After living in Romania, France and Brazil in his youth, he settled in Bucharest in the early 1930s . There he edited the Yiddish magazine “die woch” . With the growing Romanian anti-Semitism, he moved to Chișinău in Moldova in 1940 after Ion Antonescu came to power . There he became a Soviet citizen and a member of the Soviet Writers' Union .

At the beginning of the Second World War , he and his family fled into the depths of the Soviet Union . In 1943/44 he lived in Moscow . In 1944 he was appointed as a dramaturge at the state Yiddish Goldblat Theater in Chernivtsi. When a fellow writer soon denounced him as a Jewish nationalist , Trotskyist and cosmopolitan ( “a Westerner!” ), “An unprecedented political agitation was unleashed against him” (Rychlo, Liubkivskyj). On April 16, 1949, in broad daylight, he was arrested by NKVD men on a Czernowitz street and taken to a prison in Chișinău . After a brief investigation with preconceived accusations, the almost 60-year-old man was sentenced to ten years in “Siberia”. In the Gulag Taischet , Irkutsk Oblast , he lived under the most difficult conditions until 1955. After his complete political and legal rehabilitation he was able to return to Chernivtsi - a broken man.

When he died, the Soviet regime saw in him a blatant “internationalist” and had him buried in the old Christian cemetery in Chernivtsi. His last wish to be buried in the Jewish cemetery (Czernowitz) next to his friend Elieser Steinbarg was ignored .

In 1990, a memorial plaque by the Chernivtsi artist Jurij Schelegin was placed on house number 23 in Kobyljanska Street , where he lived from 1961 to 1981 .

plant

prose

  • Mirage (dazzling) , 1926 ( short stories)
  • The Wiener Kutsche (di winer kareta) , 1935 (novellas)
  • Medrisch Pinchas , 1936
  • Butterflies , 1938
  • The root (the worzl) , 1949, Moscow 1959

Dramas

  • Jephthes daughter , 1947

Edits

Translations into Yiddish

Altman wrote sketches ( simche-we-sossel ) and songs ( Gavroche , John Bull ) for the Yiddish actress and chanson singer Sidi Tal . In the last years of his life he wrote his memoir "Notes from an Old Man " in Russian . His memories of the Gulag play a major role in this. Altmann's stories, novels and ladies have now appeared in several countries.

source

  • Peter Rychlo , Oleg Liubkivskyj: Czernowitz City of Literature , 2nd, improved edition. Chernivtsi 2009, pp. 97–103

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b novel, description of Jewish life in Bessarabia at the turn of the 20th century
  2. ↑ Tales from the war years
  3. ↑ Drama for the Yiddish theater in Chernivtsi
personal data
SURNAME Altman, mosque
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Altman, Moses
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian Yiddish writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 8, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Lipcany
DATE OF DEATH October 21, 1981
Place of death Chernivtsi