[2] His mother's family were successful landowners, while his paternal side included the tzadik Shayele Kutner and his grandfather, the rabbi of Kutno.
[3] He received both a secular and religious education, initially writing in Hebrew from 1905 but shifting to Yiddish from the influence of I. L. Peretz by 1908.
Following the invasion of Poland in 1939, Trunk and his wife fled eastward, into Siberia, Japan, and eventually the United States.
[3] Trunk's corpus of works ranged widely, from novellas and short story collections to essays and non-fiction books about socialism, Jewish culture, and writers, foreign and domestic, including Hersh Dovid Nomberg and Oscar Wilde.
Following his arrival in the United States, he wrote a seven-volume autobiography, Poyln (Poland), that included collections of literature, criticism, and Chełm-related folklore.