the impulsive, temperamental Eastern Galician poet and designer, the settler of the Ukrainian village and its peasants -- the same who, in the Nazi years, bestially cut off his young life." Heart for the Second World War, H., who had much love for Yiddish theatre and maintained a close contact with Yiddish actors, settled in Stanislaw. In the years of 1939-40 he lived there under the Soviet Occupation, and there he was literarily active. According to testimony of three saved Jews, he died (2 October) Hoshanah Rabah 1942 together with nine-thousand Jews in Stanislaw. According to another version, he was killed by the local peasants in the town of his birth Meydan.

Melech Ravitch characterized him in "My Lexicon" (1938):

"Ber Horowitz is one of the powerful Jewish poets. He sings loudly. His poetry is noisy, even the quiet tenor of his lyrics is noisy. Horowitz's first song book was named, "Fun mayn heym in di berg (From My Home in the Country)." He had never reviewed this booklet. He never let go of their general tone, and he was never caught again. He also wrote stories about the renowned. Alone they He thought of them and illustrated them, and somewhere he lost us in the mountains ... He uses a language that is semi-gentile, Judeo-Slavic pidgin Yiddish. He is a splendid representative and this alone has a bit of a stir for him: What am I? Although this is not new that poets should believe their painters -- and vice versa.

... Horowitz was an only son, early on he lost his father, had a complex family life, and he is rarely seen anywhere, seldom writing. This made him a little offhand from the course of literature. He has always been like a striker who falls from the height, makes a stir and rises again.

Ber Horowitz the painter is a chapter in itself. On good walls there hung his caricatures of Yiddish writers in Warsaw's literary unions. In the songs he gets frosty and is often raw -- in the drawings he is fine and refined and very witty. He brings out the deepest expression of the characters he paints. He knows the paintings of the world, writes a cycle of songs about a world-famous painter, but he does not fill himself in the field. He takes on the world, jumping on benches, tinsters ,and open books as he did in his early youth in Hebrew school. So he is. He can't go anywhere else."

Yitzkhok Turkow-Grudberg writes:

"He was literally a glutton of beauty, a lifeblood. Outside he was a Slavic type, in temperament -- Sooner a gypsy, in ideas -- A mixture of Christian light with a renowned Shabbes Chasid; in national form -- A Jewish Jew;  in poetry -- by his all- smashing fantasy and original portrayal -- a storyteller; in the prose -- a lyricist; in drawing - a poet ... This was in the year 1939. And then he was still dazzled with splendor, like his pockets with papers. Various artistic projects, besides painting and writing -- a film scene creator, a cycle of plays. He hated small business. If plays are a cycle, than did not intend to complete a larger story, already told about poetry? [awk.] -- This is nothing. If a plays are cyclical, ay, he didn't have the patience to finish a bigger story, not to mention a poem. Most important was purpose, momentum and surely -- the fantasy that her wings were floating over him like a feather hovering above his one hundred kilo body. That perhaps is the most damaged, among the so-called psychologically damaged Yiddish writer and artist was assuredly he -- being by nature artistic and a member of the family of Yiddish writers of World War II Poland."

• "Lexicon of the Yiddish Theatre," New York, 1931, Vol. 1, p. 586.

• "Lexicon of the New Yiddish Literature," New York, 1960, Vol. 3, pp. 65-67.

• Melech Ravitch -- "Mayn leksikon," Montreal, 1945, pp. 62-64.

• Jonas Turkow -- "Extinguished Stars," Buenos Aires, 1961, p. 107.

• Yitskhok Turkow-Grudberg -- "Oyf may veg," Buenos Aires, 1964, pp. 70-73.