Vaytsman, Zisi
1946-2020
He was a poet, born in Belz, Bessarabia, into the family of a carpenter. The language in his home growing up was Yiddish. As there were no Jewish schools at that time, he mastered reading and writing Yiddish on his own. After graduating from a Russian school, he studied in a military construction school from which he graduated in 1967.
He began to write poetry in childhood, and his first creations were published in the newspaper:
Birobidzhaner Shtern (Birobidzhan Star),
while he was serving in the army in the Far East. He was the deputy to the commander of a military division, and after demobilization he settled in the city of Samara, where he was active in Jewish life of the local community.
In the 1970s and 1980s, he published in
Sovetish Heymland (Soviet Homeland) in Moscow.
He made aliya in 2006 and settled in Beersheva.
He translated
Yisroel Emyot’s memoir, Der Birobidzhaner Inyen (The Birobidzhan Affair), into Russian.
He contributed to the anthology,
A Ring, di Antologye fun der Yidisher Poezye inem Nokhn-Khurbn-Dor (A Circle, Anthology of Yiddish Poetry in the Post-Holocaust Generation) (Tel Aviv, 2017), 169 pp.
Vaytsman's poetry also appeared in book form in Russian translation.
He died in Beersheva.
His Yiddish-language poetry collection:
A Freylekhe Regn (A Happy Rain) (Tel Aviv: Library of Contemporary Yiddish Literature, 2016).