URKE NACHALNIK belongs to the underworld, perhaps even more so today than in his own time in Poland between the wars. Equally out of place in the sentimentalized shtetl and among the heroes and heralds of progress, he belongs to the unwritten part of the Jewish past that has nearly faded from collective memory.

We are venturing into uncharted territory. There is very little written about the Jewish underworld or Jewish criminals in Poland. The Encyclopedia Judaica entry for crime gives only a summary of crime statistics in the Diaspora. Practically the only scholarly work on the subject is a statistical study by Liebman Hersch of the University of Geneva, written as a series of articles in 1936–8 and published in book form in Polish translation in 1938. Hersch analysed official Polish statistical data for 1924–5 and found a lower level of criminal activity among the Jewish population compared to the general population. This applied to both the frequency and the gravity of criminal acts committed by Jews in two of the three examined categories: crimes against the person and crimes against private property. Only in the third category, crimes against the legal order (namely, avoiding conscription, profiteering, and begging), was the level of crime higher among Jews than non-Jews. According to Szyja Bronsztejn, the same trend continued in the 1930s.

We lack some of the most basic biographical facts about Urke Nachalnik, not to mention an authoritative biography. Two reference works, a new dictionary of Polish Jewish history and culture and an essential monograph on Jewish literature between the wars, do not mention him at all. There are two accounts of Nachalnik's life, an apologetic one by Abram Karpinowicz and a critical one by Stanisław Milewski. Both, however, are literary in character. They lack sources, they differ in significant details, and they are inconsistent with other sources including Nachalnik's own autobiography. Even Nachalnik's real name differs in the accounts of his life; it is variously given as Icchok Farberowicz, Icek Boruch Farbarowicz, and Icek Senderowicz from Białystok.

Urke Nachalnik was the underworld nickname that he retained as a pen name. The linguist Maria Brzezina tells us that the first name derives from the thieves’ argot, urka meaning a seasoned thief, in a form adjusted to the morphology of Yiddish (and the Yiddish-influenced Polish of Jews), and the second name comes from the adjective nachalny, meaning brazen or impudent.