Gedaliah Shaiak was born in Lowicz, Poland. His early poems and translations from Polish Literature appeared in the Lodz Yiddish journal Literary Horizons. He left Poland at the age of 24 and settled in London, where he contributed to the Yiddish Daily Post. Later he travelled through France, Belgium and Germany as a freelance correspondent. He returned to Poland in 1932, where he edited the Klodzer Post and Folkskultur and started the regional weekly, Mazovsher Vokhenblatt. At the end of 1939 he escaped via Russia, volunteered for the Polish Army and eventually made his way to Palestine in 1942, where he worked as a correspondent until 1948.
After some time in Paris where he studied at the École des Beaux Arts, he emigrated to Australia. In Melbourne, he attended the School of Fine Arts at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) and took a course in Journalism at the University of Melbourne. From 1949 to 1963 he was the editor of the Yiddish weekly, The Australian Jewish Post, and contributed to The Australian Jewish Herald. In 1966 he edited Lovitsh : a shtot in Mazovye un umgegent, seyfer, a Holocaust memorial book for the town of Lowicz. Shaiak travelled extensively around Australia and Papua New Guinea and published his impressions in The Australian Jewish Post in a series called 'Black and White in Australia'. As an artist he participated in several collective exhibitions and held two solo exhibitions in Melbourne. He was a member of the Fellowship of Australian Writers (FAW) and of Yiddish PEN, New York. Some of his unpublished work includes plays, a novel on which he was working at the time of his death and a monograph titled, in manuscript, 'Shylock and the Christian World'.
