He is known for being a chronicler of Jewish life in the eastern European Polish villages (or shtetlekh) like the one in his native Kazimierz Dolny in south-eastern Poland.

The house stood on Błotna Street as it was called at the time, due to the fact that the creek would overflow and the road turned to a muddy area.

[1]On a crisp day in the fall of 1931, Dr. Saul Silberstein, a student of Sigmund Freud who was doing post-doctorate work on his book, Jewish Village Mannerisms came into the Goldberg cobbler workshop to have his shoes repaired.

In the morning, they went by foot to Lublin, a distance of 26 miles, and Dr. Silberstein obtained the opinions of several respected individuals of Goldberg's work.

Dr. Silberstein was able to interest several other wealthy sponsors, such as the honorable Felix Kronstein, a judge, and a newspaper publisher who supported the artist through his graduation from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.

At 17, he was the youngest to be admitted and studied under the Rector of the Academy and Professor Tadeusz Pruszkowski, Kowarski, Władysław Skoczylas and Jan Gotard [pl].

Goldberg, his future wife, her sister, and their parents escaped by foot to Russia moving north as the Germans advanced, settling in Novosibirsk.

[1] Goldberg received a fellowship from the Polish Ministry of Culture to study at the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris, and in 1949 they returned to Poland.

The regime frowned on depictions of "Jewish Life" in Post-War art which drove a final rift between the artist and his intent to help rebuild the destroyed Poland.

"The next morning," his son recalls, "he unpacked a purchase of black magic markers and sat down to try them out on the newly coated watercolors.

Beginning with this accidental interruption, he evolved, progressing quickly, a unique style that found its way into all his other themes, even his abstract work."

In 1967, Goldberg arrived in the United States, with a two-year business visa on an exhibition tour and continued to paint, and create line engravings of his village characters, as well as sculpt.

His body of work on the dance theme included paintings, watercolors, and sculptures carved in wood or made of aggregate concrete.

In videotaped interviews with the artist's son, Shalom, it becomes clear that Goldberg's career took two parallel paths of creation by virtue of his ability to compartmentalize his time and to the success of his Judaic theme to support him and his family throughout his life.

Goldberg quickly executed numerous pencil drawings while his son, Shalom made BW photographs that he later developed in his darkroom.

When the artist moved to Houston, he began to sculpt dance figures by carving them directly into wood, these were later cast into bronze and issued as small editions of eight.

He returned to Poland with his wife and son, Victor, and began to create over 150 works of art dealing with the Holocaust, many of which are in the permanent collection of several museums, namely the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago.

Working concurrently between his traditional Shtetl theme and a bold, new channel that can be identified with a start in 1970 in full force and lasted through the 80s, Goldberg's genius is proven with his hundreds of drawings that reveal his inner thoughts.

He responded to modern life around him after a brief shock, and each evening, after dinner, he sat in the kitchen, or his den, and made hundreds of pen and ink drawings that can best be defined, as Emotivism.

Life appears to be encroaching upon him, sometimes threatening him, reminding him of wisdom that had been lost or sold, sacrificing the individual’s boundaries and freedoms.

Using this new modern way of expression, he was able to channel his pains stemming from the unspeakable acts of extermination beyond his earlier preoccupation with making an everlasting art memorial to his village characters.

Goldberg's masks and street violence paintings reveal a mind that Could leap from his mission to respond to modernity and its various convoluted aspects.

Intense and profound, yet the art originated with the same man who had committed himself to make a memorial to an earlier way of life... in his Shtetl, Kazimierz Dolny.

Instead, they develop a commercial presence throughout their productive years, exhibiting and showing aspects of their evolution through a more likely color palate that will sell and fetch better pricing.

In 1987, while working on the modernist themes above, Goldberg returned to painting his beloved Kazimierz Dolny and the Jewish life in the village.

Wydawnictwo prezentuje życie i twórczość Chaima Goldberga, który urodził się w Kazimierzu w 1917 roku w biednej rodzinie tutejszego szewca.

Dzięki odkryciu jego talentu przez dr. Saula Silbersteina i udzieleniu wsparcia finansowego młody artysta miał szansę studiować w prywatnej Szkole L. Mehofferowej w Krakowie, a nastepnie w Akademii Sztuk Pięknych w Warszawie.

Tutaj trafił pod skrzydła prof. Tadeusza Pruszkowskiego, który był nota bene twórcą kazimierskiej kolonii artystycznej.

Los sprawił, że Chaim po ucieczce przed Zagładą nigdy do Kazimierza już nie wrócił, ale miasteczko ciągle było obecne w jego twórczości.

Obrazy kronikarza kazimierskiego sztetla pokazują zarówno życie codzienne jego mieszkańców, jak i dni świąteczne.