Josef Burg (May 30, 1912 – August 10, 2009) was an award-winning Jewish Soviet Yiddish writer, author, publisher and journalist.[1]
Biography
Burg was born on May 30, 1912, in the town of Vyzhnytsia,[1] in the region of Bukovina, Austria-Hungary. In the years before World War I, the city of Chernivtsi, also called Czernowitz in both German and Yiddish, was the capital of the Bukovina region and a center of Yiddish language and culture.[1] The region became part of Romania following World War I.
Burg published his first professional writing in the Chernovitser Bleter, a Yiddish newspaper, in 1934.[1] The Romanian government closed and banned the Chernovitser Bleter in 1938, on charges of Bolshevik propaganda.[1]
Burg continued to write and publish his works well into his 90s. In 1990, Burg revived the once banned Chernovitser Bleter newspaper as a monthly publication.[1]
Josef Burg died of a stroke on August 10, 2009, in Chernivtsi, Ukraine, at the age of 97.[1]