Songs of My Moods: a Folio of the Yiddish Poetry of Harry (Hershl) Altman

Harry Altman was born in Poland in 1912 and grew up a virtual orphan on the streets of Jewish Warsaw and in the shtetel of Grodzisk between the two great wars of the twentieth century. His autobiography, Memoirs of a Stormy Life (Writer's Club Press, 2000) describes his early years of severe deprivation, abandonment by his father, Avrom Sholem Altman (a major figure in the Left-Paole movement of Zionism), and destitution. Many of the poems in this posthumous volume refer back to those days. Escaping from the Soviets after the war, and arriving at last to America, he became engaged in the more normal pursuits of making a living and raising a family, leaving him little time to pursue his life-long interest in Yiddish literature. It was during his retirement that a flurry of writings issued from his pen. He published his aforementioned autobiography, dozens of free-lance political commentaries which, over several years, appeared in the opinion pages of the Jewish daily, Forward, and the present work now being posthumously published in English translation, many poems of which appeared in Yiddish in Der Onheib (Journal of the Coordinating Committee of Yiddish Culture Clubs) and in Styles (Signonot, a Hebrew language publication out of Haifa, Israel).