Born in Smarhon (present-day Belarus, then in the Russian Empire) to a Jewish family, Kulbak studied at the famous Volozhin Yeshiva.

During the World War I he lived in Kovno (today, Kaunas, Lithuania), where he began to write poetry in Hebrew, before switching to Yiddish.

In 1923 he came back to Vilna, which after the war had become part of newly independent Poland, and was a center of Yiddish literary culture.

[1][2] In Minsk, Kulbak worked for several media organizations and for the Jewish section of the Academy of Sciences of Belarus.

His mystical novella The Messiah of the House of Ephraim (1924) draws together many strands of Jewish folklore and apocalyptic belief, presenting them from a perspective that owes much to German expressionist cinema.