Botoshansky, Jacob
BOTOSHANSKY, JACOB
BOTOSHANSKY, JACOB (1892–1964), Yiddish novelist, journalist, and critic. Botoshansky was born in Bessarabia. He was active in Romania from 1914 to 1926 as a literary pioneer of Yiddish, and, thereafter, in Buenos Aires as editor of the Yiddish daily, Di Prese. In 1914–15 he was one of the founders and editors of Likht, Romania's first modern Yiddish periodical, and collaborated with Jacob *Sternberg in writing for the renascent Yiddish theater. In Argentina, Botoshansky quickly emerged as a leader combating the influence wielded in the Yiddish theater by the criminal elements who were then prudishly called "white slave traders" he never ceased to play a prominent role in Jewish cultural life there. His writings include travel sketches of North and South America and of Israel. Two of his dramas, Hershele Ostropolyer and Reb Ber Lyover (1928), were staged in Argentina and Soviet Russia. His works include Mir Viln Lebn ("We Want to Live," 1948) and Di Kenigin fun Dorem-Amerike ("The Queen of South America," 1962), both fictional travel sketches; Di Lebnsgeshikhte fun a Yidishn Zhurnalist ("The Biography of a Jewish Journalist," memoirs, 3 vols., 1948); and Pshat ("Simply Speaking," literary essays, 1952).
bibliography:
Jacob Botoshansky tsu Zayne Zekhtsik Yor (1955); lnyl, 1 (1956), 211–12; A. Glanz-Leyeles, Velt un Vort (1958) 292–6; S. Bickel, Rumenye (1961), 356–60.
[Shlomo Bickel /
Alan Astro (2nd ed.)]