Boris Sandler

[1] Boris Sandler was born in 1950 in Bălți, Bessarabia (Yiddish: Beltz, today: Moldova), where he was raised among Holocaust survivors and their children in a Yiddish-speaking milieu which would inspire many characters and scenes in his later literary works.

From his parents and neighbors, mostly former residents of small towns and villages who had moved to larger cities after the Holocaust, he learned the native folk traditions of Jewish Bessarabia along with its rich Yiddish dialect.

After the unexpected death of editor-in-chief Mordechai Strigler several months later Sandler took over the newspaper, adding an international lineup of new contributors and training two generations of new Yiddish journalists.

Sandler also expanded The Forward's literary offerings, publishing new works by esteemed writers of the older generation including Abraham Karpinowitz, Yekhiel Shraybman, Zvi Eisenmann, Misha Lev, Rivka Basman Ben-Hayim, Tsvi Kanar, Moyshe Shklar, Yente Mash, Chaim Beider and younger writers such as Mikhoel Felsenbaum, Boris Kotlerman, Moishe Lemster, Emil Kalin and Evgeny Kissin.

Most of these films, released between 2009 and 2016, were based on interviews conducted in the late 1990s, when the last generation of Yiddish writers who came of age before World War II were still active in Israel.

Among Sandler's frequent themes are intergenerational trauma resulting from the Holocaust, the effect of totalitarian political regimes on the lives of artists and writers, the fate of Yiddish language and culture in the 21st century and the impact of immigration on multigenerational families.

Additionally Sandler's short film on the history of the Forward building received an Ippies award from the Center for Community and Ethnic Media at CUNY.

Apocrypha (Yiddish Poems, New York City, Forverts Publishing, 2014) Express-36 (Russian Translation of Hidden Saints I Recall, Moscow, Ed.