Post­ed by Nao­mi Firestone-Teeter

The New York Times reports on the death of Josef Burg, one of the last Yid­dish authors in East­ern Europe, whose death on August 10, 2009, at 97, has just recent­ly been wide­ly report­ed in English.

Itzik Gottes­man, asso­ciate edi­tor of The For­ward, says of Burg:

Josef Burg was the last Yid­dish writer from the gen­er­a­tion before the Holo­caust to remain in the Ukraine,” Mr. Gottes­man said on Thurs­day, and he valiant­ly strove to per­pet­u­ate Yid­dish lan­guage and cul­ture there.”

His writ­ings,” Mr. Gottes­man con­tin­ued, cap­ture the mul­ti­fac­eted, mul­ti­cul­tur­al his­to­ry of the Jews in the Bukov­ina region dur­ing most of the 20th cen­tu­ry and reflect the unique jour­ney of a Yid­dish writer in a city with few­er and few­er Jews.” In an inter­view with The New York Times in 1992, Mr. Burg called him­self the last of the Mohi­cans of the great Yid­dish tra­di­tion in Czer­nowitz” — refer­ring to his city as it was known when it was part of the Aus­tro-Hun­gar­i­an empire.

Burg’s works include:

1934: Oifn splaw
1939: Oifn tscher­musch
1940: Ssam
1980: Dos leben geit wait­er
1983: Iberuk fun tsajtn
1988: Ein Gesang über allen Gesän­gen. Erzäh­lun­gen und Skizzen.
1990: A farsch­petik­ter echo
1997: Zwej weltn
1997: Zewikelte stetschkes
2000: Irrfahrten
2004: Sterne altern nicht
2005: Däm­merung. Erzäh­lun­gen
2006: Mein Czer­nowitz
2006: Begeg­nun­gen – eine Karpaten­reise
2007: Über jid­dis­che Dichter. Erin­nerun­gen
2008: Ein Stück trock­enes Brot

Read the Full Arti­cle Here