MOYSHE ZALTSMAN (MOJSHE SALZMAN)

MOYSHE ZALTSMAN (MOJSHE SALZMAN) (October 9, 1908-1999)

            He was born in Zamość, Poland.  He studied in religious elementary school, and worked as a tailor.  At first, he was part of the Youth Bund, later active in the Communist Party.  He spent time in prisons in Poland and France where he had moved in 1929.  He was dispatched to Soviet Russia in 1933, and there he was arrested in 1937 for “espionage” and sentenced to ten years of exile in a Siberian camp.  In 1947 he was freed and in 1956 rehabilitated.  From 1959 he was in Paris, and later he was in Israel.  His books include: Un men hot mikh rehabilitirṭ, iberlebungen fun a yidishn komunist in di stalinishe tfises un lagern (And they rehabilitated me, experiences of a Jewish Communist in Stalinist prisons and camps) (Tel Aviv: Yisroel-bukh, 1970), 315 pp., which was translated into Hebrew and French [and German, English, and Russian—JAF]; Yoysef epshteyn (Kolonel zshil), der heroisher yidisher frayheyts-kemfer (Joseph Epsztejn [Colonel Gille], the heroic Jewish freedom fighter) (Paris, 1980), 71 pp.; Di groyse enderung in yidishn lebn in frankraykh, fun der zeks-togiker milkhome biz 1980 (The great change in Jewish life in France, from the Six Day War to 1980) (Tel Aviv: Yisroel-bukh, 1980), 157 pp.; Bela shapiro, di populere froyen-geshtalt (Bela Shapiro, the popular image of women) (Paris, 1983), 71 pp.

Ruvn Goldberg

Berl Kagan, comp., Leksikon fun yidish-shraybers (Biographical dictionary of Yiddish writers) (New York, 1986), cols. 255-56.