LEYB GORNSHTEYN

LEYB GORNSHTEYN (b. 1917)

            He was a poet, born in the town of Polone (Pollone), Ukraine. He graduated from the local Jewish secondary school and went on to study at the Kiev, and later the Odessa, Pedagogical Institute. He received a diploma for a teacher and worked as one for a number of years in the field of Yiddish language and literature. From 1939, he was a language editor (stylist) for the Yiddish newspaper Der shtern (The star) in Kiev. He began writing poetry while still a child. He published his first poems in the Kharkov Yiddish newspapers Zay greyt (Get ready!) and Yunge gvardye (Young guard), and later he placed poems and essays in Der shtern. In 1932 he was a delegate to the All-Ukrainian Conference of Children Correspondents which took place in Kharkov. In subsequent years, he published poems and essays in the Yiddish press in Kiev, Moscow, and Birobidzhan. At the start of WWII, he was evacuated to Tashkent, where he published essays and literary treatments in the Uzbeki and Russian press. In the literary collection Tsum zig (To victory), which was compiled during the war and edited by Perets Markish (published by Der emes publishing house in 1944), he was represented by a poem. According to certain accounts, he became mentally ill, and he died in a Tashkent neurological clinic.

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), pp. 75-76.