Yankev Shternberg

Who was Yankev Shternberg?

Yankev Shternberg 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.

Shternberg grew up in the northern Bessarabian shtetl of Lipkany, 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 Shteinbarg. As a child, Shternberg went to school in Kamenets-Podolsky with and closely befriended another important future Yiddish writer Moyshe Altman

Shternberg debuted in 1908 with a fairy tale in the newspaper Unzer Lebn; published poetry in Reizen's collections "Fraye Erd" and "Dos Naye Land", and in "Gut Morgn". Moved to Czernowitz, then to Romania in 1914 and became associated with a short-lived Yiddish-language magazine Likht, 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."