From Australia’s Jewish past

Pinchas Goldhar – A Pioneer Australian Yiddish Writer

Pinchas Goldhar was born in Łódź, Poland, then part of Russia, on 14 June 1901.  He was the eldest of four siblings of Jacob, a textile dyer, and Rachel.   Pinchas was educated at a Jewish secondary school and attended Warsaw University.  By 1922, he had begun working for the daily newspaper “Lodz Yiddish.” Around this time, Yiddish literature was experiencing something of a renaissance in Poland, and Pinchas soon became a notable Yiddish writer. He translated many German and French novels into Yiddish, including ‘The Weavers’ by the German writer Gerhart Hauptmann, which became a favourite on the Yiddish stage.

In Poland, antisemitism was increasing, and to escape it, Jacob, now a widower, and his three children set off for Australia, arriving in 1926. By 1928, the family was settled in Melbourne, and Jacob started a small dyestuff business in Carlton called Jacob Goldhar & Sons, and Pinchas became a partner.

Pinchas’s passion was to write, and on 16 June 1931, he became the inaugural editor of the first Yiddish newspaper in Australia, known as Australier Leben (Australian Life) which at that time was being produced by printer and stationer David Altshul.  In 1933, the newspaper was sold to Leslie Rubinstein.  Pinchas would write about the tensions, trials and mental agony of lonely migrants uprooted from their former homes trying to adjust to life in a new world.  In 1937, Pinchas contributed to the first Yiddish book published in Australia, the Australian Jewish Almanac. In 1939 he contributed to the second published book Stories from Australia. These books attracted worldwide reviews and even caught the attention of Bashevis Singer, a favourable noted critique. Some of the stories written have been translated into modern-day English.

Pinchas translated many stories, throughout his life, including those of Henry Lawson, Susannah Pritchard, Frank Dalby Davison, Alan Marshall, and Vance Palmer, to name a few.  He was particularly interested in the quality of Australian literature.  One essay about Australian literature was later translated by Nita Bluthal and Stephen Murray-Smith and published in 1947 in the Melbourne University Magazine.  He was very social and built a circle of friends throughout his life who were both Jewish and non-Jewish.

William and Hilary Rubinstein dedicated their book The Jews in Australia (1986) to Pinchas.  In 2016, a most important collection of Pinchas’s stories was published in English translation titled, The Collected Stories of Pinchas Goldhar: A Pioneer Yiddish Writer in Australia. Along with the republished version of Between Sky and Sea by Herz Bergner, it was the subject of “a major survey of Yiddish-Australian literature” written by Louis Klee for the  Sydney Review of Books in 2018.  Pinchas has also been the subject of several scholarly essays.

When the City of Melbourne wanted to acknowledge the Jewish presence in Carlton before 1950, they asked the University for a name. The result was Goldhar Place, named in Pinchas’s honour, near Elgin, Lygon and Faraday Streets, which was once the hub of Jewish Carlton before the shift to Caulfield.  Since his death, he has achieved an enhanced reputation as probably the foremost Australian Jewish writer of his time.

In 1934, Pinchas married and  had three children. Unfortunately, he died at the age of forty-six from coronary thrombosis on 25 January 1947.

Josh Goldhar, Pinchas’s son shared some personal reflections in an AJHS Journal

The Age critic Clive Turnbull said that Cafe in Carlton was the best story written in Australia during the war years.  Pinchas’s work was received widely as a new and unexpected asset, a welcome and integral contribution to the national literature. Alan Marshall noted in a talk I attended as a child that he was happy to acknowledge that our literature now embraced a significant element of the wider community, one about which little was known and never described before. He said this was an interesting addition to the usual bush and kangaroo settings of Australian stories, a new area that enriched the spectrum. Pinchas was invited to visit with other writers who came to the Palmers’ inner circle, then the elite gathering place of the literati. Pinchas was gladly brought into the realms of Australian literature on fully equal terms in the years between 1930 and 1946.  Pam McLean, a respected author, observed that she saw his name crop up so often in different contexts that she became intrigued about who this character could have been, as she noted his links with various artists, poets, critics, editors, academics, and journalists. The numerous references she saw regarding Pinchas in her research indicated he appeared as a pivotal figure on the cultural scene, moving among many creative people in the arts, not simply a figure in Jewish cultural circles. The headmaster of the Yiddish school, Joseph Giligich, invited him to offer a few children’s stories to the school’s magazine ’The Fight’ and ‘Sale of Joseph’, which have also appeared in English.

The AJHS acknowledges the following references in the preparation of this story:

Australian Dictionary of Biography – Judah Waten;  Wikipedia; Monash University;

AJHS Journal 23, 3 (2017)

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