Born in
Smarhon (present-day
Belarus, then in the Russian Empire) to a
Jewish family, Kulbak studied at the famous
Volozhin Yeshiva. During
World War I he lived in Kovno (today
Kaunas, Lithuania), where he began to write poetry in
Hebrew, before switching to Yiddish. He made his publishing debut in Yiddish in 1916, By 1928 he became disappointed with the literary atmosphere in Poland, and decided to return to Minsk (capital of the Soviet Belarus), where much of his family lived, and where there was a lively Yiddish literary scene. ==Bibliography==