Theater and staged, among other works, M. Daniel's Zyamke Kopatsh and Sholom-Aleichem's Motl Peysi Dem Khazns ("Motl Peysi, the cantor's son") with Sidi Tal in the boys' roles. During the war, he and his theatre evacuated to Uzbekistan, where he worked for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and was mobilized into a paramilitary construction unit. After the war, he returned to Kishinev and resumed his work at the Moldovan State Jewish Theater, where he staged his play Di Balade fun der Esesovke Brunhilde un ir hunt ("The ballad of the SS soldier Brunhilde and her dog") and published poetry in the almanac Heymland (1948). He was arrested at the height of the Stalin's campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans" (Jews) in the spring of 1949 and was sent to labour camps for 7 years. On his early return and rehabilitation 5 years later, Shternberg settled in Moscow and worked as a translator of Romanian literary works into Russian. He began to publish literary essays and poetry in the newly founded Sovetish Heymland in 1961 and briefly became a member of its editorial board. Collections of his poetry were published in Bucharest and Paris, and in Hebrew translation by Shlionsky and Penn in Israel on the occasion of his 75th birthday. Shternberg died of a heart attack in 1973 on the very day he received a permission to leave for Israel. His wife, the composer Otiliya Likhtenshteyn, who set his poems and those of other Soviet Yiddish poets (first of all Leib Kvitko) to music, died the same year. A collection of Shternberg's literary essays on theatrical topics was published posthumously in Israel. A committed socialist, Shternberg wrote that, in the wake of the October Revolution, "we satirized bourgeois assimilation, struggled with the [Jewish] clergy, fought for progressive Jewish culture, for the emancipation of the Jews, for the rights of citizenship… for progressive Jewish literature." Books Shtot in profil. Lid un grotesk ("City in Profile. Poetry and Grotesque", Bucharest, 1935) Izbrannoe" ("Collected Poetry", in Russian, Moscow: Sovetskiy Pisatel', 1954) Lid un balade af di karpatn ("Songs and Ballads of the Carpathians", Paris: Afsnay, 1968) In krayz fun yorn (geklibene lider) ("At the Crossing of Years" (collected poems)", Bucharest: Kriterion, 1970) Veygn literatur un teater ("On Literature and Theater" (critical essays), Tel Aviv, 1987) Notes and references Bercovici, Israil, O sută de ani de teatru evriesc în România'' ("One hundred years of Yiddish/Jewish theater in