Yiddish Culture in Wartime, 1939-1945

In the ghettos of German occupied Poland, paper and pen became important weapons of cultural and spiritual resistance. Underground archives in Warsaw, Lodz, Vilna and elsewhere gathered documents and hid them in buried time capsules. These time capsules included diaries and essays, fiction and poetry, reportage and religious writings. Historians like Emanuel Ringelblum in Warsaw worked night and day to make sure that even if they did not live to see the liberation, Jews would at least know that posterity would remember them on the basis of Jewish sources and not German documents.

This course will examine what those time capsules contained. It will focus on writings from the ghettos of pre-war Poland and Lithuania and, in keeping with the purposes of YIVO, on materials written originally in Yiddish. Authors will include Avrom Sutzkever, Emanuel Ringelblum, Peretz Opoczynski, Joseph Zelkowicz, Yitshak Katznelson, Rachel Auerbach, the Piaseczner Rebbe and several others. The course will also study a major pillar of wartime culture, ghetto songs.

This course will be conducted in English. No knowledge of Yiddish is required.

Samuel Kassow is the Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, and is recognized as one of the world's leading scholars on the Holocaust and the Jews of Poland. Kassow was born in 1946 in a DP-camp in Stuttgart, Germany and grew up speaking Yiddish. Kassow attended the London School of Economics and Princeton University where he earned a PhD in 1976 with a study about students and professors in Tsarist Russia. He is widely known for his 2007 book, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Indiana University Press). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research, has won numerous awards, and has lectured widely. 

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