E. was born on 1 December 1899 in Vilna, Polish Lithuania. His parents were owners of a wine business. He learned in a cheder, and after his father's death he was raised by his grandfather, who took him to the townspeople, where E. learned in a yeshiva. At the age of nine, he went off to Vilna, where he learned with his grandfather and then completed eight classes of a Russian early school.

In 1909 he performed "theatre" in Russian by himself in homes with his school friends, the actors-to-be Joseph Buloff [Bulkin] and Osya Shteyn [Kamien], in improvised "plays." During the First World War he transformed his mother's wine cellar into a "theatre" and acted there with the aforementioned for admission money. Later for one-and-a-half years he was conductor of the band for the German occupying forces. In 1917 he participated as an assistant theatre director in Buloff's offering of Dymov's "The Singer of his Sorrows," and in February 1918 he entered into the Vilna Jewish State Theatre under the name of Azro. Soon thereafter he participated in the sporadic productions under the direction of Shteyn, Morevsky, then a season with Lipovski. In 1920 he was with Kaminski and Turkow, then under the direction of David Herman. For six months he left the stage and worked in a leather factory. E. participated again in various Warsaw Yiddish troupes. In 1923 he was in the Vilna drama, in 1926 with "Vik't," with whom he went on tour in Romania. For a certain time E. returned to the Vilna Yiddish Theatre, then managed with various Yiddish troupes across the Polish province.