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The Polishness of Lucy S. Dawidowicz's Postwar Jewish Cold

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The Polishness of Lucy S. Dawidowicz's Postwar Jewish Cold A JEW SH FEM NNE MYST QUE? The Polishness of Lucy S. Dawidowicz' s Postwar jewish Cold War NANCY SINKOFF Lucy S. Dawidowicz (r9r5-I990 ), the American Jewish historian known for her work on East European Jewry and its destruction, was a fierce political animal in the postwar years. Her interests included the history of Jewish politics and the role of the leaders of the formal Jewish community as stewards of Jewish com­ munal life. Late in life, while working on a history of American Jews, she wrote to historian Robert Dallek: "For some years now I've been engaged in research for a broad-gauged history ofJews in America. Politics is one of the many aspects ofJewish life I want to write about-Jews in politics, as office holders, and in rela­ tion to men in power."' Although her youthful political education had begun on the left, by the 1970s Dawidowicz had firmly entrenched herself in the emergent neoconservative camp, a vocal critic of the New Left and of the social move­ ments associated with 1960s radicalism. Like that of many other Jewish neocon­ servatives, Dawidowicz's politics were fueled by an unrelenting anticommunism. Already in the 1950s, when she wrote several major articles on communism for liberal anticommunist popular journals like Commentary and The New Leader, Dawidowicz had begun to develop a public persona as a cold warrior. Although passionate ideological feuding informed the anticommunism of the group of primarily male intellectuals associated with Partisan Review and Commentary, later dubbed the "New York intellectuals" by Irving Howe in his Commentary article of 1968, "The New York Intellectuals: A Chronicle and a Critique," Dawidowicz's rejection of communism was also based in her life-long involvement with modern Yiddish culture.' Educated in the interwar years in the Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute schools, Dawidowicz (then Schildkret) went to Vilna, Poland, in 1938 as a graduate fellow (aspirant) of the YIVO Institute. During the war years, she worked for New York YIVO' s director Max Weinreich, returning to Europe in 1946 as an employee of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee's educational department to focus on the educational needs of Jewish refugees. In 1948 she married Szymon Dawidowicz, a Warsaw Bundist, and the marriage solidified her intimate connection to Yiddish and to 31 32 NANCY SlNKOFF Lucy S. Dawidowicz's Postwar jewish Cold War 33 Poland. Balancing her Yiddishist and American selves, Dawidowicz's journey to As AdolfHitler consolidated power in Germany in the 1930s, Yiddish-speaking becoming a New York intellectual and a cold warrior coursed through the brutal American Jews became acutely aware of the looming crisis in Europe, and in torrents of the European twentieth century that destroyed and dislocated the Poland in particular. In 1935, Roman Dmowski replaced the deceased J6zef heartland of East European Jewry. Her connection to her experiences in Europe Pilsudski as president of the Republic of Poland, auguring a shift in that nation's before and after the war, as much as the broad social, economic, and intellectual political climate that turned open anti-Semitism into government policy.8 As lit­ changes informing postwar American Jews, shaped Dawidowicz' s life and career. erary scholar Anita Norich has shown, interwar American Yiddish writers, while The historiography on postwar American Jews has emphasized their distance inhabiting the same space as their Anglo-Jewish peers, differed from them in cul­ from their European origins. Increasingly "at home in America," the children and tural outlook. The former still looked to Europe, and created works that presup­ grandchildren of European Jewish immigrants are characterized as having posed a transnational secular Jewish cultural world. They expected to be read on moved out of densely populated urban neighborhoods, embraced a suburban both sides of the Atlantic.9 Youth in the Yiddishist world engaged equally with lifestyle and the expectations of separate gendered spheres, discarded Yiddish, Europe and America. Lucy Schildkret wrote for and edited Shrift (Writing), the and created an Americanized Judaism.3 Yet Dawidowicz's life challenges this organ of the SAYG, which devoted regular columns to developments in Europe. complacent image of postwar Americanized Jews.4 Always living within the A 1937 editorial, "You Will Not Drive Them Out," saluted the efforts of a Jewish municipal boundaries of New York City, working for pay outside the home, and deputy to the Polish Sejm, Emil Sommerstein (1883-1957), who rejected the call remaining connected to Yiddishist circles, Dawidowicz brought a European per­ for Jewish emigration from Poland. Shrift's pages cried out: "The Jews of the sona and perspective to her politics and her attitudes toward American society. world stand with you to build a free and renewed Poland. For us American Jews, Although she lived and wrote in New York City, prewar Poland, particularly the there is only one way-unity in our support for Polish Jews. The Jewish Congress city ofVilna, was always on her mind. should continue to lead American Jewry in huge demonstrations and protest Like Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Bell, and Irving Howe, Lucy cries against the murderers who are attacking our brothers in Poland. We will Schildkret hailed from an immigrant home in New York City, attended a public not let you drive the Jews out of Poland!"'0 school, and went on to one of the city's free public colleges. In contrast to these Urged by her shule history teacher Jacob Shatzky to continue her study of mod­ men, however, she also went to a supplementary Yiddish afternoon school, a em Yiddish at the YIVO institute in Vilna, Schildkret set off for Poland in the sum­ shule, and to a Yiddish summer camp, Camp Boiberik, through her high school mer of 1938. At the Vilna YIVO, she met and befriended the luminaries of modem years.5 At Hunter College, the women's college equivalent to the more famous secular Yiddish culture: Elias Tcherikower, Chaim Grade, Avrom Sutzkever, City College of New York, incubator of the "New York intellectuals," Schildkret Zalman Reisen, Zelig Kalmanovich, and Max Weinreich." These relationships took classmates and faculty by storm. Majoring in English, she contributed to proved to be not only personal for Schildkret, but also represented to her the vital­ Hunter's literary magazine, Echo, becoming editor in 1935, and joined the school's ity, diversity, and resilience of Polish Jewish culture, and these aspects of that cul­ chapter of the Young Communist League (YCL). Soon thereafter, the Seventh ture would later inform her historical and public writings. Paradoxically, though, Congress of the Communist Party initiated the Popular Front, an international Schildkret' s ambivalence toward secular Yiddish culture began in Vilna, the imag­ campaign of cooperation with noncommunists, including members ofbourgeois ined urban apotheosis of]ewish secularism.12 Her Vilna year also proved decisive and socialist parties. From 1935 to 1939, the Communist Party actively cultivated in extinguishing any positive feelings toward communism that she had had. ethnic and national cultures, formerly considered suspicious bourgeois expres­ Schildkret's deep connection to Riva and Zelig Kalmanovich, the latter of 6 sions of parochialism. In her memoir and in supporting archival material, whom had fled Bolshevik Russia in 1921, permanently shaped her hostility to Dawidowicz reported that the Popular Front line tested her politics and personal­ communism. Zelig Kalmanovich, a Diaspora nationalist and a Yiddishist, became ity. The Hunter College YCL rejected both the rapprochement with bourgeois a member ofthe Jewish Socialist Workers Party, which advocated Jewish cul­ parties and the autocratic demand for compliance demanded by the Comintem; tural autonomy within the future socialist Russian state, and wrote for the party's nevertheless, the latter order spurred Schildkret's exit from the YCL.7 After col­ journal, Difolksshtime (The People's Voice). After World War I, he ended up in lege, she found herself marginally employed and personally adrift. To fill her time, the Soviet Union, where he witnessed the radicalization of Yiddish culture in she immersed herself in secular Yiddish culture through the Sholem Aleichem war-roiled Ukraine. Soon recoiling from Bolshevik ideological constraints on Yungt Gezelshaft (SAYG), the youth organization affiliated with her earlier Yiddish culture, he fled, his hatred of the Bolsheviks severing any kind of social­ Yiddish school movement. Although SAYG tended to lean to the left, its political ist leanings from his Yiddishism.'3 His 193! Yiddish essay, "Perspectives for autonomy reflected the beginning ofSchildkret's own political independence. Yiddish Culture in the Soviet Union," argued against the possibility of a Yiddish 34 NANCY SINKOFF Lucy S. Dawidowicz's Postwar jewish Cold War 35 future in the Soviet Union since the proletarian goals of the Yevsektsiya, the shocking the revelation that two leaders of the Bund, Henryk Erlich and Viktor Jewish section of the Communist Party, reduced Yiddish to a utilitarian means of Alter, whom William Green, head of the American Federation of Labor, had inculcating Bolshevism among Jews; Yiddish as an autonomous expression of been reassured were still alive in 1942, had in fact been murdered by the Soviets. 14 modem Jewish culture was considered dispensable. By 1934, Kalmanovich had On March 30, 1943, Schildkret attended a protest meeting organized by David settled in Vilna, becoming central to the operation of the YIVO, which he Dubinsky and the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union.18 The event believed offered the best hope for bolstering secular Jewish culture and the was hotly contested by many in the American labor movement because of the Yiddish language in the new independent nation states that had emerged after Soviet alliance with the United States, but, for Schildkret, Jewish oppression World War I. His mistrust of any kind of political litmus test for Yiddish culture under the Soviet sickle was beginning to seem like Jewish oppression under the was to have a lifelong effect on Schildkret.
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