AustLit

Herz Bergner's family left the township of Radimno to settle in Vienna during WW I and returned at the end of the war. During the 1920s Bergner's elder brother, a Yiddish writer, Melech Ravitch, became the secretary of the Union of Yiddish writers in Warsaw. Bergner started writing himself and belonged to a group of young, left-wing Jewish writers. He decided to emigrate when he married and followed his brother, who had originally come to Australia in 1933 to raise funds for Jewish secular schools in Poland. In Australia, Bergner met Pinchus Goldhar and other Yiddish writers and, together with Abraham Schulman and Goldhar, began the literary publication Oyfboy which was published in Melbourne by Oyfboy Publishing (Eng. trans. Reconstruction).