Boris Sandler

Boris Sandler was born in 1950 in Bălți, Bessarabia (Yiddish: Beltz, today: Moldova), where he was raised among Holocaust survivors and their children in a Yiddish-speaking milieu which would inspire many characters and scenes in his later literary works. From his parents and neighbors, mostly former residents of small towns and villages who had moved to larger cities after the Holocaust, he learned the native folk traditions of Jewish Bessarabia along with its rich Yiddish dialect. Sandler began studying music at the age of five, eventually enrolling in a music conservatory. He worked as a professional violinist for a decade, including seven years playing with the Moldovan State Orchestra. He took a two-year hiatus from his musical career, however, to study literature as part of a group of Yiddish and other minority-language writers who attended the Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow for graduate studies. There in 1981 Sandler was among the first cohort of Yiddish writers and poets to study Yiddish literature at the graduate level in the USSR since Stalin's purge of Yiddish writers and educational institutions in the late 1940s. He made his literary debut that same year in the USSR's state-sponsored Yiddish literary journal Sovetish Heymland, where he would later serve on the journal's editorial board. His first collection of short fiction, Stairway to a Miracle, was published in 1986.

In 1989 Sandler became the host and lead producer of the first regularly-appearing Yiddish-language television show On the Jewish Street, which aired for several years on Moldovan television. During this period Sandler created two Yiddish-language documentary films, "Where is My Home" and "Don't Give Up Yiddish!" about Moldovan Jewish life. Sensing that most of the community would soon leave for Israel, he used the documentaries as a way to preserve the memories of Bessarabian Jewry at a time of great upheaval. From 1990 until 1992 Sandler was also the editor of the Yiddish section of the Chișinău-based newspaper Our Voice. Sandler moved to Israel in 1992, where he soon became active in the local community of Yiddish writers and journalists, contributing articles to the Yiddish press, working in a publishing house and at Hebrew University where he assisted in the cataloging of interwar Yiddish periodicals. In addition to his work as the executive director of Leivick House Publishing, Sandler published a children's magazine Kind un Keyt. During this period three of Sandler's books appeared in Israel; the novella Case Number 5390 (1992) and the short story collections The Old Well (1994) and Gates (1997).

In 1998 Sandler moved to New York to begin working at the Yiddish edition of The Forward. After the unexpected death of editor-in-chief Mordechai Strigler several months later Sandler took over the newspaper, adding an international lineup of new contributors and training two generations of new Yiddish journalists. Sandler also expanded The Forward's literary offerings, publishing new works by esteemed writers of the older generation including Abraham Karpinowitz, Yekhiel Shraybman, Zvi Eisenmann, Misha Lev, Rivka Basman Ben-Hayim, Tsvi Kanar, Moyshe Shklar, Yente Mash, Chaim Beider and younger writers such as Mikhoel Felsenbaum, Boris Kotlerman, Moishe Lemster, Emil Kalin and Evgeny Kissin. Additionally, Sandler oversaw the production of several thousand hours of The Forward's weekly Yiddish radio show, and produced a dozen CDs of Yiddish music and audio books, which were released under the aegis of The Forward. During this period several of Sandler's novels appeared as serials in the paper. Besides his work as a writer and editor Sandler also produced a series of twelve documentary films about the lives of Yiddish writers. Most of these films, released between 2009 and 2016, were based on interviews conducted in the late 1990s, when the last generation of Yiddish writers who came of age before World War II were still active in Israel. Additionally he oversaw the launch of the newspaper's YouTube channel.

Sandler retired from the "Yiddish Forward" in 2016 after 18 years as editor-in-chief. He continues to publish his own fiction as well as the works of others in the online publication "Yidish Branzhe", which he founded and edits.

Boris Sandler is recorded with the occupation journalist. Recorded as writer, journalist, poet and violinist.