YANKEV VINTER

YANKEV VINTER (b. 1902)

            He was born in Lodz, Poland, graduated from the Lodz Hebrew high school, and studied journalism at Warsaw and Lemberg Universities.  He lived in Paris and for a time in Spain, 1935-1938, before returning to Poland.  At the time of the German invasion of Poland, in 1939, he escaped to Lemberg where he was arrested by the Bolsheviks and sent to a camp in the distant northern regions of Russia.  With the amnesty for Polish citizens in 1941, he was freed, and for a time he was a representative of the London Polish government for the Fergana and Samarkand districts and worked on behalf of Jewish war refugees.  He was again arrested in 1943 and sent to a camp.  He began his writing activities in the Polish press in Lodz and Warsaw.  In 1930 he switched to Yiddish.  He placed pieces in: Lodzer tageblat (Lodz daily newspaper) and Nayer folksblat (New people’s newspaper) in Lodz.  During the civil war in Spain, he was a special correspondent for Nayer folks-tsaytung (New people’s newspaper) in Warsaw, in which—aside from letters from the war front—he published reportage pieces, interviews, short impressions, and articles of a general character.  There has been no information about him since 1943.

Source: P. Shvarts, in Fun noentn over (New York) 2 (1956), p. 432.