SHIYE HOKHSHTEYN (JOSHUA HOCHSTEIN)

SHIYE HOKHSHTEYN (JOSHUA HOCHSTEIN) (b. August 22, 1897)

            He was born in Manhattan, New York.  He studied at Columbia University and Jewish subject matter with Meyer Vakhsman, the Yiddish-Hebrew writer Yisroel Levin, and primarily at his father’s home which maintained its traditional Lithuanian Jewish way of life in the United States.  Over the years 1916-1918, he was the first Yiddish-Hebrew teacher in Havana, Cuba, and there he helped to found the first Ashkenazi Jewish organization in that country.  Back in America, he worked as a teacher of Spanish in a New York high school.  For a time he was a lecturer in Spanish language and Latin American history at City College and Columbia University.  He worked for the American Jewish Committee and other Jewish institutions in New York.  His first publications were correspondence pieces on Jewish life in Cuba for Tog (Day) in New York in 1917, and from that time forward he published articles, reviews, treatises, studies, and memoirs in: Tog, Forverts (Forward), Morgn-zhurnal (Morning journal), Nyu yorker vokhnblat (New York weekly newspaper), and Tsukunft (Future) in New York.  The Yiddish press in Latin America and Canada republished the materials and articles from those that he edited for the weekly bulletin, Yedies (Information) from June 1943 to October 1951.  He also published in Hebrew in Hadoar (The mail) in New York, and Gesher (Bridge) and Haolam (The world) in Jerusalem; in Spanish for La prensa (The press) and Diario de Nueva York (New York diary) in New York, and the Spanish-Yiddish and Spanish press in Latin America (concerning Yiddish writers); in English in The New York Times, Herald Tribune, as well as the periodicals Hispania and High Points.  He was living in New York.

Source: Tsukunft (New York) (March 1947).