Born in Bergen-Belsen, Germany, in a displaced-persons camp that had been a concentration camp, Oscar Pelta came to the United States on the USS General M.L. Hershey six months later. "My parents bought a little bakery in the black ghetto of North Philly where I encountered a living poetic oral tradition on the streets of Susquehanna Avenue in the form of street poems, jump rope songs, nasty nursery rhymes and the blues. I am a bona fide ragman for my livelihood, which trade I ply in California and environs from the safety of Vancouver Island, B.C., where I live with my wife Connie, an academic and PhD, on an acre of big old trees. My full time avocation is the practicing and playing of fretted string instruments. My daughter Enion Pelta Tiller is a wizard fiddler in many bands as well as in her own band Taarka (www.taarka.com), which she leads with her husband, mandolinist David TIller." Pelta's poetry can be found at www.dreamagic.com/poetry/pelta.html and elsewhere online.
