In the Land of Starry Skies and Vanished Dreams: Yiddish Jewish Writers in Stalinist Moldavia

• In Event: Bitter Years: Soviet Antisemitism in the Wake of the Holocaust

Abstract

During the interwar era many committed Yiddishists from East European countries were watching with fascination the next-door Soviet experiment. For this particular group of Jews, the most appealing part of it was the unprecedented (for that time) state’s support to Yiddish culture and Yiddish education. Illustrative of that fascination, in 1940, two Bessarabian Yiddish language writers, Yakov Shternberg and Moshe Altman, chose to leave their promising career in Bucharest and moved to the Soviet Union, aiming to join and contribute to the burgeoning Yiddish culture in the land of Soviets. The initial success and high positions bestowed upon them in the Soviet state (e. g. Shternberg became the as artistic director of the newly created Moldavian State Jewish Theater, both of them become members of the Writers’ Union of the Moldavian SSR) made their risky move look justified. However, ten years later Shternberg and Altman, together with several other Bessarabian Jewish writers, found themselves under arrest, accused of nationalism and Trotskyism. Based on newly available archival access to investigation and trial dossiers of those writers, this study will bring to light the story of shuttered dreams of Yiddish Jewish writers in Stalinist Moldavia.

Author

• Diana V. Dumitru, Georgetown U