Born in Glina, Galicia and died in New York, Shtoltzenberg’s father was a salesman and a wedding singer (badkhn). Abba participated in a Jacob Gordon play with his father when he was fifteen. In 1923 in New York he published poetry in many Yiddish journals including Tsukunft. His selected poems appear in English in Leftwich, Mirror of a People (1961), and with Irving Howe and E. Greenberg, Treasury of Yiddish Poetry, 1969. He died of cancer.