Yankev Shternberg
Yankev Shternberg (in English language texts occasionally referred to as Jacob Sternberg; ; ; 1890, Lipcani, Bessarabia, Russian Empire – 1973, Moscow, USSR) was a Yiddish theater director, teacher of theater, playwright, avant-garde poet and short-story writer, best known for his theater work in Romania between the two world wars. Biography Shternberg grew up in the northern Bessarabian shtetl of Lipkany (Yiddish: Lipkon, now Lipcani in Moldova), which was famously termed "Bessarabian Olympus" by Hebrew and Yiddish poet Chaim Nachman Bialik and which in the second half of the 19th century produced several major figures of the modern Yiddish and Hebrew belle-lettres, among them Yehuda Shteinberg and Eliezer Steinbarg. He attended a Russian secondary school in Kamenets-Podolsky, where he was a classmate and close friend of the future Yiddish writer Moyshe Altman. Shternberg debuted in 1908 with a fairy tale in the newspaper Unzer Lebn (Odessa). He published poetry in Reizen's collections "Fraye Erd" (1910) and "Dos Naye Land" (1911). In the 1910s, he published poetry in the periodicals Hamer (Brăila), Frayhayt, Arbeter Tsaytung, and Dos Naye Lebm (all in Czernowitz), as well as Gut Morgn (Odessa), (Warsaw), and Tsayt (New York). In 1914 Shternberg settled in Romania, at first