Background
Pollak grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna, and received private lessons in her secondary school subjects, music and modern languages.
Pollak grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna, and received private lessons in her secondary school subjects, music and modern languages.
She wrote largely under the masculine pen name Paul Althof. Some of her work was published in the Secession magazine Ver Sacrum. After the marriage, the Gurschners lived in Paris for two years.
As "Paul Althof", she had newspaper and magazine articles published in the Neue Wiener Journal, the Illustritre Wiener Extrablatt, the Wiener Fremden-Blatt, the Österreichische Volks-Zeitung and the Berliner Börsen-Courier.
She was a member of the Austrian Association of Women Artists.