'Jewish life appears to be frozen, static, like a puppet play': Pinchas Goldhar's struggle for Yiddish cultural authenticity in Australia

Pinchas Goldhar arrived in Australia in 1926 from Poland. A committed Yiddishist writer he found life confronting. He had abandoned a flourishing cultural world for what he regarded as the stultifying environment of the Melbourne Jewish community. Goldhar had personally experienced the rise of Nazism. During his 1932 visit he witnessed Hitler delivering a speech and was under no illusions about the implications for Germany's Jews of Nazi antisemitism. The consequence for Goldhar was gut-wrenching - the devastating loss of millions of Jewish lives and the virtual extinction of the Yiddish-speaking world