Literatureאלמה שין

Alma Shin

Alma Shin is an Israeli translator who translated the works of her father, the Yiddish writer Eli Schechtman, into Russian.

born 1939Translating Eli Schechtman into RussianYiddish to Russian literary translationTranslating Paul Celan's poems

Born: 8 February 1939, Kyiv
Occupation: translator
Education: Zhytomyr Ivan Franko State University

Alma Shin was born in 1939 in Kyiv

Alma Shin is the pen name of Larisa Berny-Shectman. She was born in 1939 in Kyiv. Her father was the Jewish writer Eli Schechtman and her mother was the Jewish actress Sheindl Magazinnik.

She studied at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of the Zhytomyr Pedagogical Institute. She then did postgraduate studies at the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics in Moscow. In 1973 she emigrated to Israel.

In 1996, after her father's death, she began translating his Yiddish works into Russian. She translated his story collection Sonatas, the autobiographical novel Rings on the Soul, the epic novel Erev and the novel The Last Sunset.

She also translated selected poems of Paul Celan from German and works by Naftole-Hertz Kohn from Yiddish. In 2023 she published a Ukrainian version of Rings on the Soul. She is the mother of Professor Iva Gilboa-Schechtman of Bar-Ilan University.