B. was born on 28 February 1882 in Plintsk (Plonsk), Poland. His father was a sexton. He learned in cheders and in Beit Midrashim. He was an excellent musician, and therefore became a choir boy with a cantor.

Kompaneyets heard him sing in shul and he took him into his troupe as a chorus singer. After a short time German took him into a member's troupe, where B. participated in a tour across the Polish province. Already here he acquired  a name for himself as an excellent comic, and after that he acted for a short time in Julius Adler's itinerant troupe across Poland, and he became engaged in Lodz in Zandberg's troupe. Here in the Grand Theatre in Lodz B. became the darling of the public.

His comic type made him popular across Poland and Russia, and on the eve of the war he was engaged for Vilna in Nakhum Lipovski's troupe.

In wartime, B. turned up in Harbin, where he acted in Yiddish theatre, and in 1917 he came to America. Here he acted for a season in Philadelphia, later in Boston and Chicago, and in the end, after certain hardships, there came the opportunity to perform for New York's Jewish public; he became engaged in the Liberty Theatre in Brownsville, where he, in the span of two seasons, made himself very popular.