Kister went to school in Sanok and Przemyśl. In 1932 he began studies in law at the University of Lviv, but in 1933 he moved to Warsaw, where he worked in a publishing house. In 1939 he emigrated to Palestine, where he studied Arabic in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, among others under David Hartwig Baneth and Shlomo Dov Goitein. In 1945–46 he worked as press secretary of the Polish embassy at Beirut. From 1946 to 1958 he taught Arabic at the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa.
