NAKHMEN DIMENTSHTEYN

NAKHMEN DIMENTSHTEYN (d. 1941)

            He was born in Rezhitse (Rēzekne), Latvia, brother of Zalmen Dimentshteyn (for information on their father, see Zalmen’s biography).  He wrote poetry with a romantic air.  He published his poems in the 1920s and early 1930s in various Yiddish newspapers and magazines in Latvia, among them: Letste nayes (Latest news) and Frimorgn (Morning).  He also placed poems in the anthology Ringen (Links) in Kovno (1940).  He contributed to Bleter 1940 (Leaves, 1940) (Kovno, 1940).  Later, the Riga publisher Levitas was preparing for publication a large volume of his poetry, but it never appeared with the outbreak of WWII.  His entire family was killed under the Nazis.  Nakhmen, though, refused to surrender alive to the Nazis.  When they came to take him, he cut his own arteries.

Sources: Y. Bashevis, in Tsukunft (New York) (July 1940); M. Gerts, 25 yor yidishe prese in letland (25 years of the Yiddish press in Latvia) (Riga, 1933), pp. 38, 40, 54; Almanakh fun riger relif (Almanac of Riga relief) (New York) 3 (1948), p. 9; B. Mark, Umgekumene shrayber fun di getos un lagern (Murdered writers from the ghettos and camps) (Warsaw, 1954), p. 210.

[Additional information from: Berl Kagan, comp., Leksikon fun yidish-shraybers (Biographical dictionary of Yiddish writers) (New York, 1986), col. 198.]