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.