Who Will Write Our History?: Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto - Softcover

Kassow, Samuel D.

 
9780307455864: Who Will Write Our History?: Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307455866 ISBN 13: 9780307455864
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

In 1940, in the Jewish ghetto of Nazi-occupied Warsaw, the Polish historian Emanuel Ringelblum established a clandestine scholarly organization called the Oyneg Shabes to record the experiences of the ghetto's inhabitants. For three years, members of the Oyneb Shabes worked in secret to chronicle the lives of hundereds of thousands as they suffered starvation, disease, and deportation by the Nazis. Shortly before the Warsaw ghetto was emptied and razed in 1943, the Oyneg Shabes buried thousands of documents from this massive archive in milk cans and tin boxes, ensuring that the voice and culture of a doomed people would outlast the efforts of their enemies to silence them. Impeccably researched and thoroughly compelling, Samuel D. Kassow's Who Will Write Our History? tells the tragic story of Ringelblum and his heroic determination to use historical scholarship to preserve the memory of a threatened people.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Samuel D. Kassow is the Charles Northam Professor of History at Trinity College. He is author of Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia, 1884-1917 and editor (with Edith W. Clowes and James L. West) of Between Tsar and People: The Search for a Public Identity in Tsarist Russia. He has lectured on Russian and Jewish history in many countries, including Israel, Russia, and Poland.

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Chapter 1 From "Bichuch" to WarsawGALICIA Was it just a coincidence that more Jewish historians came from Galicia, part of the Habsburg Empire, than anywhere else in Eastern Europe? Lwów produced Meyer Balaban, Philip Friedman, and Natan Gelber. Tarnów was the home of Isaac Schiper and Salo Baron. Rafael Mahler, Ringelblum's lifelong friend, and Artur Eisenbach, his future brother-in-law, grew up in the small town of Nowy Sacz. They all came from a region that differed in many important ways from Jewish Lithuania and Congress Poland, just across the Russian border. They were the products of a cultural milieu that combined excellent Polish education with strong Jewish nationalism. Habsburg rule was milder, educational opportunities greater. During Ringelblum's formative years, Galician Jewry was undergoing a fateful process of redefinition and self-examination. Emanuel Ringelblum was born in Buczacz (Bichuch in Yiddish) in eastern Galicia on November 21, 1900. Once a part of Poland, the province passed under Habsburg rule in 1772 before it became part of the new Polish republic in 1918-19. The area of Buczacz was also known as Podolia. The Buczacz of Ringelblum's childhood was a pretty town, surrounded by wooded hills and nestled in a bend of the river Strypa. High up overlooking the town was an old empty castle, "der puster shlos," where, according to tradition, the legendary Polish King Sobieski staged a daring ambush of Tatar invaders. On Saturday afternoons young couples would explore the countless tunnels that lay underneath the castle.1 The great Hebrew writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon— Ringelblum's cousin—grew up in Buczacz and left a beautiful description of his birthplace in the story "B'tokh iri" (In my town). 2 Dominating Buczacz was the splendid Ratusz, or town hall, an imposing baroque landmark built by Prince Nikolai (Miko_aj) Potocki in the eighteenth century. Buczacz had long belonged to the Potockis, one of the greatest of the Polish landowning families. Like other Polish magnates the Potockis—eager to further their economic interests—went out of their way to attract Jews.3 From the very beginning Buczacz was a predominantly Jewish town. In 1870, 68 percent of the population had been Jewish (6,077 out of 8,959 inhabitants); in 1900, the year Ringelblum was born, there were 6,730 Jews out of a total of 11,755 inhabitants—or 57.3 percent of the population. The surrounding countryside was heavily Ukrainian. Buczacz was a poor town, like most towns in Galicia, with little industry. Jews dominated trade, mainly in grains and other agricultural products, but the low purchasing power of the peasant population severely limited economic possibilities. In time, the growth of both Ukrainian and Polish cooperative movements would deal another heavy blow to the economic position of the Jews. Dim economic prospects served as a powerful stimulus to emigration. Many Jews, including Jacob Freud, Sigmund Freud's father, left for Vienna. Shmuel Yosef Agnon, the future Nobel Prize winner, also left the town at a young age. Emanuel Ringelblum's father, Fayvish, a grain merchant, was respected, if not particularly prominent in the Jewish community and regarded himself as a maskil, a follower of the Jewish Enlightenment. Someone who met him during World War I recalled that "he looked like an ordinary Jew [folksmensh], a 'Jewish Jew' [yidishlekher yid]. He was dressed half-Jewish, half-European, without earlocks but with a short, red beard."4 Ringelblum's mother Munie, née Heler, died when he was twelve years old. In later years he would use her name as a nom de plume. Fayvish was determined that his children—two sons and two daughters—have a solid education in both Jewish and secular subjects. 5 As a child, Ringelblum studied in a modern heder (Jewish elementary school)—a so-called heder metukan6—and attended one year of the local Polish gymnasium before the family fled the Russian invasion in 1914. He also participated in a Zionist youth organization led by the dynamic Zvi Heller, who later emigrated to Israel. Natan Eck, who worked with Ringelblum in the Warsaw Ghetto, recalled that Ringelblum loved to tell stories of his childhood in Buczacz.7 Although he never returned to live in his hometown, he would often refer to his childhood there. In some ways Buczacz was like other Jewish small towns in Eastern Europe, and the young Emanuel grew up in an atmosphere rich in Jewish folk culture. But in other ways Buczacz was different. While East Galicia and Podolia were Hasidic strongholds—the native grounds, after all, of the Ba'al Shem Tov—Buczacz stood out as a bastion of the Haskala. Hasidim were a minority,8 and their relative weakness made it easier for strong Zionist organizations to grow in Buczacz before World War I. A third of the students in the local Polish high school were Jews, and they received a solid grounding in classics and exposure to Polish and European high culture. Many of the high school's most popular teachers were Jews.9 The town boasted a large Baron de Hirsch primary school, set up to give Jewish students both a general and vocational education. Some of its graduates went on to the gymnasium, others entered trades. By the beginning of the century, several alumni who had remained in Buczacz had already formed a fledgling Jewish labor movement.10 Although young Jews received a Polish education, they did not become young Poles. The Galician Jewish intelligentsia, however acculturated, was surrounded by a strong and vibrant Yiddish-speaking folk culture nourished in many places by deep-rooted Hasidic traditions. Buczacz Jews—like other Galician Jews—considered themselves lucky that they did not live across the border in Russia. They did not have to worry about stiff quotas barring them from high schools and universities. The Polish political elite had built up a network of Polish high schools that freely admitted Jewish students, making Polish the preferred language of educated Galician Jews. The Galician "gymnasium" instilled discipline and orderly work habits. Meanwhile, across the Russian border, thousands of desperate Jewish young people either went abroad to study or wasted countless years trying to pass university entrance exams. Many, embittered and alienated, would join the revolutionary movement. In Galicia, only finances—not legal quotas—stood between Jewish youth and the great universities of the empire. They could choose between a German education in Vienna or a Polish university in Krakow or Lemberg (Lwów). Many attended both. A university degree did not guarantee prosperity; there were too few jobs for university graduates. (Less fortunate Jews on the other side of the Russian border liked to swap barbed jokes about the ubiquitous—and often impecunious—"doctors" who inundated the tiniest Galician shtetl.) Unquestionably, however, this university-educated Galician- Jewish intelligentsia, with its overlay of European culture, imbued Galician Jewry with a special character. In the early years of the Polish Republic, many Galician Jews, including Emanuel Ringelblum, would stream to Warsaw. There, in the new capital of the new state, they used their excellent Polish and superior educational credentials to good advantage as teachers in state schools for Jewish children, Jewish secondary schools, and administrators in various Jewish institutions. Unlike their brothers from Lithuania, Russia, and Congress Poland, Gali-cian Jewry had also benefited from the more congenial political climate of the Habsburg Empire. By the 1860s, they had won legal emancipation. Long before the first Duma elections in Russia in 1906, Habsburg Jews were participants in the political process. When Ringelblum was growing up in Buczacz, the town had a Jewish mayor, Berish...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2009
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307455866
ISBN 13 
9780307455864
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
585
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
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Deutschland

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