Jewish Eastern Europe in Lucy S. Dawidowicz's the Golden Tradition

Chapter 11 Dubnow’s Other Daughter: Jewish Eastern Europe in Lucy S. Dawidowicz’s The Golden Tradition

Nancy Sinkoff

A Yiddishkayt of folk air to prick the heart and pour warm honey at the sight of things that touch the cockles? If that’s the stuff we celebrate we’d better do without. - jacob glatstein, “Yiddishkayt”1

In 1967, Lucy S. Dawidowicz (1915–1990) published The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe, an anthology of translated autobiographi- cal primary sources from Jewish Eastern Europe.2 Garnering glowing reviews in the major English-language press, the book earned her instant acclaim among the New York literary public, both Jewish and general.3 While Dawido- wicz is probably best known for The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945 – her classic “intentionalist” work on Nazi antisemitism and Jewish responses to it – which made her, along with Elie Wiesel, one of the most sought after lecturers on the Holocaust in the 1970s and 1980s,4 it was The Golden Tradition that

1 Jacob Glatstein, “Yiddishkayt,” in The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse, ed. Irving Howe, Ruth R. Wisse and Khone Shmeruk, trans. Cynthia Ozick (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987), 462. 2 Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967). 3 See the numerous clippings of the book’s reviews in the Lucy S. Dawidowicz Papers, box 57, *P-675, American Jewish Historical Society (ajhs), New York and Boston. The Golden Tradi- tion was also reviewed in Der Tog by S[amuel] Margoshes on February 25, 1967, under the title “Farshvundene velt” (A Vanished World). 4 Dawidowicz spoke at Northwestern University (1977), Syracuse University (1980), Indiana University (1980), and Stanford University (1981). She also delivered “The State of World Jew- ry” lecture at New York City’s 92nd YM-YWHA (1984). Dawidowicz was also sought after by social policy institutes, book and magazine editors, and other scholars. For example, Robert Jay Lifton asked her for a letter of recommendation to the National Endowment for the

230 Sinkoff launched Dawidowicz’s career as an expert on Jewish life in Eastern Europe.5 Two years after the book’s publication, Dawidowicz was hired to teach in the history department at Stern College, where she developed a syllabus on the Holocaust. In 1974, she was appointed the Paul and Leah Lewis Chair in Holo- caust Studies (renamed the Eli and Diana Zborowski Chair in Interdisciplinary Holocaust Studies in 1976) at Yeshiva University, the first endowed chair in this field in the United States. Dawidowicz dedicated The Golden Tradition “In Remembrance of Zelig and Riva Kalmanovich, d. Estonia, 1943, Two of Six Million.” In so doing, the histo- rian framed the anthology as a literary response to the Holocaust.6 Moreover, she constructed the book with the explicit goal of engaging postwar American Jews with the Eastern European Jewish past before the community’s destruc- tion.7 Published three years after the 1964 Broadway staging of Fiddler on the

Humanities for a grant to research Nazi physicians that worked in concentration and death camps. See Robert Jay Lifton to Lucy S. Dawidowicz, June 1, 1977, September 23, 1981; Novem- ber 24, 1981, and Lucy S. Dawidowicz to Robert Jay Lifton, November 2, 1981, Dawidowicz Pa- pers, box 69, folder 6. On Lifton’s Holocaust-related scholarship, see Kirsten Fermaglich, American Dreams and Nazi Nightmares: Early Holocaust Consciousness and Liberal America, 1957–1965 (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press and University Press of New England, 2006), 125–57. 5 Dawidowicz published six other books on Jewish history and culture. See Lucy S. Dawidow- icz and Leon J. Goldstein, Politics in a Pluralist Democracy: Studies in Voting in the 1960 Election (New York: Institute of Human Relations Press, 1963); Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews: 1933–1945 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975); idem, A Holocaust Reader (New York: Behrman House, 1976); idem, The Holocaust and the Historians (Cambridge: Harvard Univer- sity Press, 1981); idem, On Equal Terms: Jews in America 1881–1981 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982); idem, From That Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938–1947 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989). Additionally, her popular works on Jewish identity, the Yiddish language, the Holocaust, and Jewish memory and historiography appeared in the major American and English-language Jewish periodicals of the postwar era, including The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine, Commentary, The Times Literary Supplement, Midstream, Reconstructionist, This World, and others. 6 On her relationship with the Kalmanoviches, see Dawidowicz, From That Place and Time, 51–53. In an interview conducted by Arthur Kurzweil, editor of Jason Aronson Inc., she ex- plained that “When I undertook to work on The Golden Tradition, I had in mind first of all to pay homage to that destroyed world of East European Jewry.” Arthur Kurzweil, “The Jewish Book News Interview with Lucy Dawidowicz,” Jewish Book News, April, 1989, 7. 7 On postwar representations of Eastern Europe, see Markus Krah, American Jewry and the Re- Invention of the East European Jewish Past (Berlin: de Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2018). The chrono- logical purview of Krah’s book runs through 1964, so that it does not examine The Golden Tradition. On the role of English-language anthologies of East European Jewish literature as a vehicle for cultural transmission and construction, see Jeffrey Shandler, “Anthologizing the Vernacular: Collections of Yiddish Literature in English Translation,” in The Anthology in Jew- ish Literature, ed. David Stern (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 304–23; and Julian