Sarah Gorby (Gorbach) was born in 1900 in Kishinev in Bessarabia Governorate, Russian Empire (today Chișinău, Moldova).
Her parents, Zeylik Khaimovich Gorbach (originally from Stara Ushytsia) and his wife Beyla Kipelman, registered their marriage in Kishinev in 1898.
[1] Gorby left Kishinev at age 17 to study music in Iași, Romania, where she married Joseph Goldstein, a publisher who spoke both Romanian and Yiddish.
Her main languages were Yiddish and Russian, and she also spoke French, Romanian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and English well.
[2] She moved to Rome and then to Paris in the 1920s, but returned to Iași every summer until the outbreak of World War II to visit her husband.