UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles The Yiddish Historians and the Struggle for a Jewish History of the Holocaust A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in History by Mark Lee Smith 2016 © Copyright by Mark Lee Smith 2016 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Yiddish Historians and the Struggle for a Jewish History of the Holocaust By Mark Lee Smith Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Los Angeles, 2016 Professor Saul Friedländer, Co-Chair Professor David N. Myers, Co-Chair At the intersection of three areas of Jewish scholarship — Yiddish studies, Holocaust studies, and the history of Jewish historiography — one encounters a group of Holocaust historians whose works have yet to be explored in their original context. The study of the Holocaust has led to increasing interest in source materials written in Yiddish, and it has also led to a well-developed literature on the history of Holocaust historiography. Surprisingly neglected in that literature are the works of the survivor historians who chose to write Holocaust history in the Yiddish vernacular of their readers. This work introduces the general subject of Yiddish historical writing — and the concept of “Yiddish historians” — in the context of prewar Diaspora nationalism. ii It explores the continuities that led these historians to study the Jewish history of the Holocaust and also rendered Yiddish historiography an appropriate vehicle for their work. Chief among these were the focus on internal Jewish history and the anti- lachrymose approach to Jewish historical writing that had developed among Yiddish historians before the Holocaust and which led to their study of Jewish life, rather than death, under Nazi occupation. In particular, their writings contest the view that early Holocaust historiography focused primarily on the “perpetrators.” Prewar Yiddish historians established a transnational public discourse with an educated lay audience that was reenacted after World War II by their survivors and successors. The interactions of the postwar Yiddish historians with their audience formed a “lay–professional partnership” that contested the existence of a “Myth of Silence” in the Yiddish-speaking world. In response to accusations of cowardice and passivity that arose against the Jewish victims of Nazism, the Yiddish historians fashioned both a vigorous defense, in studying the many impediments to Jewish resistance, and also a daring offense, in formulating a new definition of “spiritual resistance” that would expand its scope to the widespread efforts of unarmed Jews to remain alive under Nazi occupation. Most recently, the gradual transfer of the Yiddish historians’ work from the community of Yiddish speakers to the larger world of Jewish and general scholarship has gained these historians a degree of integration into the mainstream of Holocaust study. iii The Dissertation of Mark Lee Smith is approved. Peter Baldwin Arnold Band Samuel Kassow David N. Myers, Committee Co-Chair Saul Friedländer, Committee Co-Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2016 iv Table of Contents Note on Translation and Transliteration vi Note on Online Sources vi List of Figures vi Preface and Acknowledgment vii Biographical Sketch xv Chapter 1: Introducing the Yiddish Historians 1 Chapter 2: Becoming Yiddish Historians of the Holocaust 80 Chapter 3: No Silence in Yiddish 156 Chapter 4: Holocaust History as Jewish History 221 Chapter 5: The Search for Answers 310 Chapter 6: West Meets East 387 Concluding Thoughts 429 Appendix 441 Bibliography 452 v Note on Translation and Transliteration All translations and transliterations are my own. In general, I have followed the YIVO standard for transliteration of Yiddish. The few exceptions include well-known terms and names such as yizkor (rather than yisker) and Sholem Aleichem (rather than Sholem Aleykhem). Hebrew transliteration follows the Library of Congress system, but omitting diacritical marks under the consonants. For the names of persons, I have taken the dual approach of using the conventional English spelling in the text and the transliterated Yiddish or Hebrew spelling in the footnotes and Bibliography. Thus, “Rachel Auerbach” appears in the discussion, and “Rokhl Oyerbakh” appears in the footnotes and Bibliography. For well-known Polish cities, I have used their common English names (Warsaw, Lodz, and Krakow), and for others, their correct Polish spellings. Note on Online Sources A number of online sources are cited in the footnotes and Bibliography. Rather than listing a “last accessed” date for each source, each URL was re-accessed and verified at the conclusion of the work. All are current as of March 4, 2016. List of Figures Principal Yiddish Publishing Venues of the Yiddish Historians of the Holocaust 66 Map of Contributions to Yizkor Books by Yiddish Historians 189 Contributions to Yizkor Books by Yiddish Historians (map legend) 190 vi Preface and Acknowledgment The work that is placed before the reader — to use a favored expression of Yiddish writers — had its origin in a rupture of Jewish cultural continuity that occurred at the end of the twentieth century. The first stirrings of this research came at a time when the last remaining Yiddish books were disappearing from the shelves of larger urban bookstores, when public libraries were replacing their Yiddish holdings with the literatures of more recent immigrants, and shortly before Yiddish books would become the first national literature widely available online. During this brief interval, the aspiring reader of Yiddish faced a future seemingly without ready access to the printed Yiddish word. The writer of these lines — to quote another phrase much used by Yiddish authors — resolved to resist this rupture by collecting widely, then following the age- old advice to “read widely” — and doing so in Yiddish. At the personal level, I also resolved to reverse the process described by Jeffrey Shandler in which the symbolic value of the Yiddish language has often come to outweigh its value “as a vehicle for communicating information, opinions, feelings, ideas” in the era of “post-vernacular Yiddish.”1 Reading widely led from the classical authors to writers of prose and poetry generally, to literary history and linguistics, theater and humor, the rabbis and rebbes, 1 Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley, 2006), 4. vii and to the repository of them all, history. The voices that spoke most directly to me were those of the twentieth-century historians who chose to write Jewish history in Yiddish. In their much-neglected works, I had the privilege of reading the Ur-text before the commentary: Ginsburg and Zinberg testing the possibility of writing Jewish historical scholarship in the language of the people. Schiper switching languages in mid-career. Ringelblum and Mahler pulling strongly to the left — and campaigning for Yiddish among a new generation of historians. Friedman holding to the center — but also in Yiddish. The Polish group drawing inward; Tcherikower reaching for a pan-Ashkenazi history in Yiddish. Shatzky, the Yiddish Columbus, adding the New World to the territory of Yiddish scholarship. And then — suddenly — fewer voices, in more urgent discourse. Discovering these historians through the portal of their Yiddish writings provided a specific and coherent perspective. Themes that would animate the present work soon became apparent. Two of these relate to process: that a group of historians chose to turn from other languages to their shared ancestral language; and that they conducted a public discourse intended for an educated lay readership. And two themes relate to content: that their focus was on the internal history of the Jews (rather than the history of Jewish rights and disabilities or anti-Semitism); and that they were engaged in an anti-lachrymose approach to medieval and other periods of Jewish history well before it was advocated by Salo Baron (who might have joined their ranks had he followed the path of his fellow historians from the Austro- Hungarian province of Galicia). viii In the first years of the twenty-first century, the commentary was yet to emerge. Avrom Novershtern could call forth in conversation the few works touching on these historians — all, first-person accounts destined to become primary sources but without a secondary literature. John Efron encouragingly confirmed to me that these historians “have not found their historian.” The first scholars of the new century to focus on these figures (if not on the Yiddish aspect of their works) had yet to commence publishing.2 The general neglect of these historians in the literature of the time is illustrated by the article on “Jewish Historiography” in the original English-language Encyclopaedia Judaica of 1971, in which historians who worked in Yiddish before World War II receive less than one-half of one sentence, and those who wrote Holocaust history no mention at all.3 A growing familiarity with their works suggested that they merited a measure of the regard they had enjoyed in their own time and language. A first fruit was the entry on prewar and postwar historian Isaiah Trunk in the 2007 second edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica, for which Michael Berenbaum — in the spirit of a new age shaped in part by the gradual emergence of works from Yiddish into English — generously granted an expanded allotment of space.4 2 These historians include Natalia Aleksiun,