HOROWITZ, BER

HOROWITZ, BER (1895–1942), Yiddish poet, short story writer, and essayist, associated with the Young Galicia school of Yiddish poetry. Born in Majdan in the Carpathian mountains and educated in nearby Stanislav, during World War I he served in the Austrian army and lived for a period in Vienna while earning a medical degree. He worked for several years as a doctor, first in an Austrian prisoner-of-war camp for Italian soldiers and later in a hospital in Vienna. His first Yiddish poems, which appeared in S.J. Imber's Viennese literary journal, Nayland (1918), attracted much attention, and he began contributing his works to numerous Yiddish periodicals in Europe. His lyrics about robust, rural Jews living close to the soil found their finest expression in a collection of lyrics, Reyakh fun Erd ("Smell of Earth," 1930). At the outbreak of World War II, Horowitz was living in Stanislav, where he continued his literary activities. He was killed either by the Nazis or by the Ukrainian villagers among whom he lived when the Germans invaded his district in October, 1942. J. Leftwich published English translations of his works in the anthology The Golden Peacock (1961). -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Rejzen, Leksikon, 1 (1926), 784–6; LNYL, 3 (1960), 65–7. ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Y. Sandel, Umgekumene Yidishe Kinstler (1957), 122–6; Y. Papernikov, Heymishe un noente (1958), 225–26. (Melech Ravitch / Marc Miller (2nd ed.)