KHAYIM (ḤAGGAI) GOLDBERG

KHAYIM (ḤAGGAI) GOLDBERG (1890-1943)

            He was born in Lukeve (Łuków), Poland, into a Hassidic family.  From his youth he was taken with painting and literature.  He left home for Germany where he studied graphic art.  From 1912 he was living in Warsaw.  He contributed drawings to Yiddish- and Hebrew-language publications.  He was a co-founder of the Jewish “plastic-arts association in Poland.”  He was the leader of the artistic institution “Grafikon.”  He was a pioneer of modern ornamental writing and of artistically produced well-wishing cards with Jewish writing on them.  When the Germans occupied Poland in 1939, he left for Bialystok where he, until the German assault on Russia, worked as a designer and painter in a cooperative.  He began publishing poems in Roman-tsaytung (Fiction newspaper) and Der shtral (The ray) in Warsaw.  He later contributed to Eyropeishe literatur (European literature), Haynt (Today), and to the Hebrew publications: Hatsfira (The siren), Olam katan (Small world), Itoni (My newspaper), and Baderekh (On the way) in Warsaw.  On the whole his poems were satirical and humorous, and his caricatures were of actual sites in Warsaw and on literary themes.  In 1922 he published in Bikher velt (Book world) an article concerning the reform of the Yiddish alphabet with appropriate specimens, for which a sequence of type-founders created new, modern Jewish writing.  He also published a series of luxury editions of works: Moyshe apelboym, zayn lebn un shafn (Moyshe Apelboym, his life and creations) (Warsaw, 1931), 15 pp.; A bisl rekhile, tsiganerye (A little slander, exaggerations); Baladn (Ballads), illustrated; and others.  His diary was lost in the Bialystok ghetto where he was killed.

Sources: Haynt yoyvl bukh (Jubilee volume for Haynt) (Warsaw, 1928), see index; R. Feldshuh, Yidisher gezelshaftlekher leksikon (Jewish communal handbook), vol. 1 (Warsaw, 1939), p. 660; B. Mark, Der oyfshtand in byalistoker geto (The uprising in the Bialystok ghetto) (Warsaw, 1950), p. 160; Mark, Umgekumene shrayber fun di getos un lagern (Murdered writers from the ghettos and camps) (Warsaw, 1954), p. 200; Y. Sandel, Umgekumene yidishe kinstler (Murdered Jewish artists) (Warsaw, 1957), p. 83.