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Motl PolyanskiySoviet Jewish theater composer and songwriter.
Country:
 Israel |
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Biography of Motl Poliansky
Motl Poliansky was a Soviet Jewish theatrical composer and songwriter. He was born in 1910 (according to other sources, 1913) in the northern Bessarabian village of Sekuriany (during Romanian sovereignty - Sekuren, now Sokiryany - the district center of Sokiryany district in the Chernivtsi region of Ukraine). He studied composition at the Bucharest Academy of Music under Mikhail Zhor. In Bucharest, he began working in the Jewish theater under Yankev Shternberg and became friends with the aspiring prose writer Ikhi Shraybman, who worked there as a prompter. Before the annexation of Bessarabia to the USSR, he returned to Sekuriany. During the Great Patriotic War (1941-1944), he was interned in the Shargorod ghetto, where most of his family members perished. Since 1945, he lived in Chernivtsi, taught at a music school, was the head of the music department of the Kiev State Jewish Theater (Kiev GOSET) located in Chernivtsi after the war, and the author of music for performances of the Bucharest Jewish Theater and the Kishinev State Jewish Theater (Kishinev GOSET). In the 1960s, he wrote music for the Jewish People's Theater, established in Kishinev.
Composer and Songwriter
Motl Poliansky is the author of many songs based on the poems of Jewish poets in Yiddish, such as Shike Driz, Khaim Beider, Itsik Manger, Yankev Shternberg, and Moyshe Teif. These songs have been included in various anthologies of Jewish songs published in different countries (see, for example, Itzik Goldberg's "Lomir Kinder Zingen" - Let the children sing. Kinderbukh Publications: New York, 1970, pp. 128-129). Throughout the 1960s-1980s, he collaborated with the Moscow literary journal in Yiddish "Sovetish Geimland" (Soviet Homeland), publishing essays and music reviews. Since 1991, he has been living in Israel, where in 1985, a volume of his selected fiction and memoirs titled "Loib Dem Mench" (Praise a Man) was published, and in 1994, a collection of Yiddish songs with sheet music was released.
