ALTMAN, MOISHE

ALTMAN, MOISHE (1890–1981), Yiddish poet and novelist. Altman, who was born in Bessarabia, was partly self-educated. He lived in Romania and the Soviet Union. In 1920 he began writing poems and literary articles for the Czernowitz weeklies Frayhayt and Dos Naye Leben. In 1930 he immigrated to Argentina but after a year he returned to Romania and settled in Bucharest. During WWII he lived in the U.S.S.R. After World War II Altman was sent, with other Soviet Yiddish writers, to a Siberian forced labor camp (1949–52), but he survived and resumed his literary work. His prose includes two volumes of short stories, Blendenish (1926) and Di Viner Karete (1935), and the novels Midrash Pinkhas (1936) and Shmeterlingen (1939). His selected works (Geklibene Verk) were published in New York in 1955, with a biographical and critical introduction by S. Bickel, and in Bucharest (Oysgeveylte shriftn, 1974). His last books, Baym fenster and Di viner karete un andere dertzeylungen, were published in Moscow in 1980. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: LNYL, 1 (1956), 92–94. (Shlomo Bickel)