Yossel Birstein

Professor Menachem Peri considers Yossel Birstein to be one of Israel’s great underestimated writers on a par with the greatest Jewish writers of the past century. At the very least Yossel Birstein is considered a master of the short story form.
Yossel is not your typical subject matter for this blog. Yossel was born in Poland in 1920 and left Poland for Australia in the winter of 1937. His family was too poor to send him to Palestine. So his mother’s father, already in Melbourne, sent the fifty-pound boat ticket for Australia.
One could even ask whether he should be considered Australian? But then again how long did the Gibbs brothers live in Australia? And the Bee Gees are considered one of the great Australian bands.Yossel Birstein arrived in Australia almost 17 years old, served 4 years in the Australian army, worked and married in Melbourne and made aliya in 1950. His eldest daughter was even born in Australia.
Yossel hardly had any formal education and did no MA in creative writing. In his hometown Biala-Podolsk he studied in cheder and then for a number of years in the local Polish public school, which was compulsory. Though he had attended a conventional cheder, Yossel’s parents were “progressive”. Between the ages of 5 to 7, he attended a private Yiddish class, held on the floor of a man’s home. “Our parents’ gift was the learning of Yiddish – our culture”, his sister Rose told Andrew Firestone. As for his school education, his wife Marganit regales that in the seven years he and his cousin spent at school they never made it passed 4th grade.
It was during his first years in Melbourne that Yossel decided to be a poet as his first known poem relates: “Der Poet”, published in 1940 in the Oystralishe Yidishe Nayes before his 20th birthday.
Like other “refugee aliens”, Birstein then joined the Australian Army and served in a Labour Corps. Yossel was discharged from the army after three and a half years of service on 22.11.1945. After being released from the Australian army Yossel worked as the director of the Kadima Jewish cultural centre on Lygon Street, the first paid Secretary of Kadimah Cultural Organization. He was 25 years old, and tried to develop the Youth Organization.
Yossel wasn’t just your regular bohemian drop out and hit the road street legal writer; he had a head for the business world as well, as is to be expected from a Polish émigré of his generation. But even in those far off days working on Lygon Street he was nurturing literary aspirations. As secretary of Kadimah, Birstein helped see through to publication the celebrated posthumous volume of Pinkhas Goldhar’s stories, probably to this day the best Yiddish fiction to come out of Australia.
But according to his sister Rose, Yossel felt alienated. In 1947 when their first child Hana was born; Yossel and Margaret were learning Russian - preparing for emigration to the Yiddish homeland in Birobidjan. But that all changed once the State of Israel came into existence. I asked Marganit why Yossel left Australia, in my estimation an untypical move for someone you could consider a holocaust victim, even though he escaped Poland just before the war. She explained that for Yossel Jewish culture was his currency and he saw that Yiddish, the dominant language of Melbourne Jewish life at that particular period, was already losing its hold on the younger generation. He needed to be in a vibrant Jewish culture where Jews spoke their own language in the streets, shops and markets. And Yiddish, as a merely academic endeavour, couldn’t satisfy his needs.
In the days before Yossel left for Israel Kadimah farewelled its first secretary, honouring him with speeches. Kadimah even advertised the boat and time, for well-wishers to see him off.
Arriving in Israel, at first Yossel lived on Kibbutz Gvat, working as a shepherd, and later moved to Tivon and worked in Bank HaPoelim til he took on story telling full time. His first books were written in Yiddish on Gvat and in Tivon. But the novel he based on his experiences in the bank he translated into Hebrew himself and by the 1980s was writing and telling stories in Hebrew, many of his best known works being tailor made to fit into 4 minute passages for broadcasting on Galei Tzahal.