FROYM-YOYSEF
VALDMAN (1893-summer 1917)
He was born in Jassy, Romania. He studied philosophy at the local university;
at the same time, he was active in the field of Yiddish literature and
language. He began writing in his early
youth. He wrote sketches and stories in
the distinctive Moldavian Yiddish, later switching current events pieces and
criticism. He was a cofounder (with Y.
Botoshanski, Y. Groper, M. Rabinovits, and Matesl Fridman) of the first serious
Yiddish literary quarterly for literature and culture—Likht (Light), of which four issues appeared, Jassy, December
1914-September 1915, with drawings by the Romanian Jewish artists R.
Zelikovitsh, Y. Glantsenshteyn, and R. Rozenfeld. According to Y. Botoshanski, Valdman was in
charge of the section in the journal entitled “Signifying a revolution in the
Yiddish word in Romania” and of literary criticism. He also contributed to Botoshanski’s biweekly
magazine Der hamer (The hammer) in Brăila (1916), and in the anthology Kadime
(Onward), among others. He translated
into Romanian stories by Mendele, Sholem-Aleykhem, and Perets, and using the
pen name “Efrati” published them—as well as articles on Yiddish literature—in the
such Romanian-language Jewish periodicals as Hatikvah and Kadimah. According to P. Almoni’s Epoca “Licht”: Istoria unei epoci de luminä in trecutul evreilor din
Romänia (The era of Likht: An
era of lights in the Jewish history of Romania), he planned to establish a
publishing house for the translation of fictional works from Yiddish into
Romanian, but with the outbreak of WWI this was never realized. In 1916 he was mobilized into the Romanian
army and fell at the front in a battle in the Carpathians. He also published under such pen names as:
Dovid Yoysef, V. M. and Froym.
Sources:
Zalmen Reyzen, Leksikon, vol. 1; Y.
Botoshanski, in Mame yidish (Mother
Yiddish) (Buenos Aires) (1949), see index; Dr. Shloyme Bikl, in Shmuel Niger bukh (Volume for Shmuel
Niger) (New York: YIVO, 1958), pp. 79, 83, 84.
Borekh Tshubinski
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