MOYSHE PENS

MOYSHE PENS (b. 1922)

            A poet and prose author, he was born in the town of Strizhevke (Stryzhivka), Ukraine. In 1940 he graduated from a Jewish middle school in Vinitse (Vinnytsya), and he went on to study at the Piatigory Pedagogical Institute, graduating in 1947. That same year he began working as a teacher of the Russian language and literature in Dagestan. From 1969 until 1981, he worked in the Dagestan Pedagogical Institute in Makhachkala. He began writing poetry in his school years and debuted in the Yiddish press—in Zey greyt (Get ready) and Der shtern (The star)—in 1935. He returned to Yiddish in the 1970s and was especially creatively active in the early 1980s, when he studied in the group “Yidish” (Yiddish) in the elite level of literary courses at Moscow’s Maxim Gorky Literary Institute.

Chaim Beider, Leksikon fun yidishe shrayber in ratn-farband (Biographical dictionary of Yiddish writers in the Soviet Union), ed. Boris Sandler and Gennady Estraikh (New York: Congress for Jewish Culture, Inc., 2011), p. 284.