Sternberg grew up in the northern Bessarabian shtetl of Lipkany (
Yiddish:
Lipkon, now
Lipcani in Moldova), which was famously termed "Bessarabian Olympus" by
Hebrew and
Yiddish poet
Chaim Nachman Bialik and which in the second half of the 19th century produced several major figures of the modern
Yiddish and
Hebrew belle-lettres, among them
Yehuda Shteinberg and
Eliezer Steinbarg. He attended a Russian secondary school in
Kamenets-Podolsky, Sternberg debuted in 1908 with a fairy tale in the newspaper
Unzer Lebn (
Odessa). He published poetry in Reizen's collections "Fraye Erd" (1910) and "Dos Naye Land" (1911). In the 1910s, he published poetry in the periodicals
Hamer (
Brăila),
Frayhayt,
Arbeter Tsaytung, and
Dos Naye Lebm (all in Czernowitz), as well as
Gut Morgn (
Odessa),
Literarishe Bleter (Warsaw), and
Tsayt (New York). In 1914 Sternberg settled in first in
Czernowitz (then part of
Austria-Hungary, now Chernivtsi, Ukraine), and later in Bucharest,
Romania. He became associated with the short-lived
Yiddish-language magazine
Likht ("Light"), four issues of which were published in
Iaşi between December 1914 and September 1915.
Likht called for a "renaissance of the Jewish stages in Romania" and condemned the "poor foundation" of Yiddish theater as a commercial institution: "The Yiddish stage ought to be a place of education, of drawing Jews closer together through the Yiddish word… we will fight against this [commercial] state of things." In 1917, in response to
antisemitic violence at that time in Romania and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, he staged passages from Bialik. In 1930 he created a hugely successful studio theater
BITS ("
Bukareshter
Yidishe
Teater-
Studiye"), housed in
Bucharest's Jewish quarter
Văcărești, that played a prominent role in the development of modern trends in European theater. BITS staged works of
Osip Dymov (
Yashke-muzikant – "Yashka the Musician"),
Jacob Gordin,
I.L. Peretz (
Banakht afn altn mark – "A night at the old market"),
Sholem Aleichem (
Oytser – "Treasure", and most famously
Der farkishefter shnayder – "The Enchanted Tailor"),
Leib Malach (
Der Geler Shotn, 1935),
Nikolai Gogol (''
Zhenit'ba'' – "The Marriage"), – mostly musical comedies with elements of grotesque, but also
I.Y. Singer's Yoshe Kalb and his own play
Teater in Flamen ("Theater in Flames") on the theme of the then-ongoing
Spanish Civil War.
Sidi Tal starred in many of these productions. The performances were popular with the Bucharest intelligentsia and Peretz's "Banakht Afn Altn Mark", for one, was played more than 150 times. During this time, Sternberg published his first collection of poetry, in Bucharest (1938). As antisemitic, pro-fascist tendencies gained power in Bucharest, the theater left for a prolonged tour of major European cities and eventually Sternberg moved to
Czernowitz, where he continued his theatrical activities. In 1939, Sternberg along with Moyshe Altman sneaked across the
Dniester and became a Soviet citizen. A year later, when his native
Bessarabia was annexed by the Soviet Union, he and most of his former troupe settled in
Kishinev, where Sternberg became artistic director of the Yiddish-language
Moldovan State Jewish Theater and staged, among other works, M. Daniel's
Zyamke Kopatsh and Sholom-Aleichem's
Motl Peysi Dem Khazns ("Motl Peysi, the cantor's son") with Sidi Tal in the boys' roles. During the war, he and his theatre evacuated to
Uzbekistan, where he worked for the
Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and was mobilized into a paramilitary construction unit. After the war, he returned to Kishinev and resumed his work at the Moldovan State Jewish Theater, where he staged his play
Di Balade fun der Esesovke Brunhilde un ir hunt ("The ballad of the SS soldier Brunhilde and her dog") and published poetry in the almanac
Heymland (1948). He was arrested at the height of the Stalin's campaign against "
rootless cosmopolitans" (Jews) in the spring of 1949 and was sent to labour camps for 7 years. On his early return and rehabilitation 5 years later, Sternberg settled in Moscow and worked as a translator of Romanian literary works into Russian. He began to publish literary essays and poetry in the newly founded
Sovetish Heymland in 1961 and briefly became a member of its editorial board. Collections of his poetry were published in Bucharest and Paris, and in Hebrew translation by Shlionsky and Penn in
Israel on the occasion of his 75th birthday. Sternberg died of a heart attack in 1973 on the very day he received a permission to leave for Israel. His wife, the composer
Otiliya Likhtenshteyn, who set his poems and those of other Soviet Yiddish poets (first of all
Leib Kvitko) to music, died the same year. A collection of Sternberg's literary essays on theatrical topics was published posthumously in Israel. A committed socialist, Sternberg wrote that, in the wake of the
October Revolution, "we satirized bourgeois assimilation, struggled with the [Jewish] clergy, fought for progressive Jewish culture, for the
emancipation of the Jews, for the rights of citizenship… for progressive Jewish literature." ==Books==