Born in 1905 in Grodno, Russian Poland. Father -- a gravestone kritser, who was brought over to Bialystok to make a gravestone for a brother's grave from the Bialystok pogrom (on Sabbath Nachamu? 1905). His family remained in Bialystok, where G. received a traditional education, and during the German Occupation, in the first World War, he began to work at the age of eleven, learning modern Jewish subjects in the evening.

In 1921 he arrived in America, and in Cleveland he worked as a salesman in a shoe business, also he learned in evening courses, Attending the productions of the local permanent Yiddish theatres (Globe, Deutsches), and feeling the "pull" of the theatre, he participated in mass scenes during the guest appearance of the "Vilna Troupe", then in a dramatic section in a series of one-acters.

1926 -- settled in New York and entered into the "Artef Studio", where he took theatre courses for several years, participating in the first Artef offering (director Jacob Mestel) of Steiman's "Beym toyer", and acted then in almost all of the Artef productions under the direction of Benno Schneider, Benjamin Zemach, Joseph Buloff, R. Ben-Ari and Mark Schweid.

After the downfall of the Artef theatre, he dedicated himself to individual performances in an exclusively humorous program of