Prose writer Yente Mash was born in Zguritse, Bessarabia in 1922. She grew up in a traditional family that valued Yiddish. As a child she studied Hebrew with private teachers and then attended a Tarbut Hebrew high school, a Rumanian lycee for women, and finally, a pedagogical institute in Kishenev, Moldovavian S.S.R. In 1941, a few days before the Soviet Union entered WWII, she and her parents were exiled to Siberia for the sin of being “bourgeois.” There they suffered from hunger, cold, and terrible living conditions, and ultimately, her parents perished there. In 1948 she left Siberia and settled in Kishenev. Here, and also in Israel until 1985, she worked as a bookkeeper. Not until her emigration to Israel in 1977 did she begin writing. She explains that only here did she feel liberated from the great fear of investigation under which she had lived in the U.S.S.R. There she worked at the same job for almost 25 years so that nobody would find out the secret that she was a “bourgeois,” an “enemy of the people” who had been exiled to Siberia. Since her debut m Israel with the story “Dos Faryosemte Lid” (The Orphaned Song) in Yisroei-Shtime in 1978 she has published three Books: Tif in der Tayge, (Deep in the Taiga; 1990), Mokem Menuklie (Refuge; 1993), and Besaraber motivm (Bessarabian Motifs; 1998). She has won a number of literary awards including the Segal Prize, 1994, Erlich Prize, 1996, and the Fikhman and Manger Prizes, both in 1998.

*A11 quotations from Yente Mash are from personal correspondence with Sheva Zucker.