Who Will Write Our History?

by KASSOW, SAMUEL D.

• ISBN13: 9780307455864
• ISBN10: 0307455866
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2009-01-06
• Publisher: Vintage

Summary

The gripping story of a clandestine archive in the Warsaw ghetto and its heroic founder

Author Biography

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.

Excerpts

Chapter 1

From "Bichuch" to Warsaw

GALICIA
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 s

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Excerpted from Who Will Write Our History?: Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto by Samuel D. Kassow
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