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 in Czernowitz (Chernivtsi, Ukraine), and later in Bucharest. He became associated with the short-lived Yiddish-language magazine Likht ("Light"), four issues of which were published in Iaşi between December 1914 and September 1915. Likht called for a "renaissance of the Jewish stages in Romania" and condemned the "poor foundation" of Yiddish theater as a commercial institution: "The Yiddish stage ought to be a place of education, of drawing Jews closer together through the Yiddish word… we will fight against this [commercial] state of things." Israil Bercovici counts the "literary-musical" gatherings sponsored by that magazine as "the beginning of modern Yiddish theater in Romania", and sees Shternberg as preparing the way for the Vilna Troupe, the Yiddish theater troupe that brought the ideas of Konstantin Stanislavski to Romania. Nonetheless, Shternberg adopted as a slogan "Back to Goldfaden". Calling Abraham Goldfaden "the Prince Charming who woke up the lethargic Romanian Jewish Culture" when he founded professional Yiddish theater in 1876 (Iaşi), Shternberg wrote, "The only milieu that attracts the great Jewish masses is a traditional-cultural theater. Not even a literary theater… From that I created a social-political theater, a theater… [of current events]… which I think was, then, the first of its kind in Yiddish". In 1917–18, Shternberg and Jacob Botoshansky together founded a Yiddish revue theater in Bucharest, for which they wrote and produced nine short plays (revues), including Tsimes (named after the traditional pureed vegetable dish tsimes), Bukaresht-Yerusholaim ("Bucharest-Jerusalem"), ("All of a sudden"), Grine bleter ("Green leaves"), Kukuriku, Sholem-Aleykhem ("Hello"), and Hershele Ostropoler ("Hershele of Ostropol"). In 1917, in response to antisemitic violence at that time in Romania and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, he staged passages from Bialik. In 1920, he became the editor of "Der Veker", official organ of the Jewish section of the Romanian Socialist Party. In 1924–26, he