The Book Smugglers, page 20
Almost surreally, he set up everything the way it was back in Vilna: he divided the institute’s scholarly work into the same four sections (historical, philological, psychological-pedagogical, and economic-statistical); he reestablished the aspirantur graduate-training program; and he edited the institute’s journal yivo bleter. Volume 14 appeared in Vilna in 1939, and volume 15 was published in New York in 1940. Seamless continuity.1
As Weinreich went about the business of solidifying the institute on American soil, the unfolding catastrophe in Europe was never far from his mind. The featured lecture at YIVO’s January 1942 annual conference was entitled “How Do Polish Jews Live in the Ghettos?” It was given by Shloime Mendelsohn, a Bundist educator and member of YIVO’s board of directors, who escaped Poland via Vilna in 1940.2
On February 14, 1943, YIVO celebrated the grand opening of its building at 535 West 123rd Street, a modern three-story facility near Columbia University, just behind the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. The opening signaled YIVO’s entry into the mainstream of American academic life. The 123rd Street site would replace Wiwulskiego Street, at least for now, and perhaps forever.
The inauguration featured an exhibit of documents that belonged to YIVO’s collections before the war and that had been whisked out of Europe before the Germans could get their hands on them. Its 195 display items included a decree on the legal status of the Jews in Poland from 1634; notebooks with writings by the Lubavitch “middle” rebbe, Dovber Shneuri (1773–1827); a notice by the rabbis of Genoa from 1852; testimony by the survivors of the 1919 pogrom in Proskurov, Ukraine; and letters by the Russian writer Vladimir Korolenko. The catalog noted with solemn resolve, “This exhibit is more than a ‘remembrance of the destruction.’ It is also a call for continuity, in the hope that everything that YIVO possessed will in due time return to it.”3
Like so many families, YIVO was torn apart by the war, with the American side hoping against all odds that it would eventually reunite with its European relatives.
But such hopes were slim. Weinreich’s keynote address at the institute’s 1943 conference was entitled “YIVO in a Year of Extermination.” Before the war, he had fought to keep YIVO apolitical and derided those who demanded that it issue protest resolutions. Now, he organized a petition to President Roosevelt on the plight of European Jewry and collected the signatures of 283 professors from 107 American colleges, universities, and research institutions. “We appeal to you to take measures that have not yet been undertaken to rescue the millions of European Jews who have been sentenced to death by the enemies of civilization.”4
The YIVO staff divided its energy between engaging in scholarship, institution building, and a grim deathwatch, as news reports trickled in. The institute held a program in memory of Simon Dubnow, the dean of Jewish historians and a member of YIVO’s academic board, on October 17, 1943, soon after word reached the West that he had been murdered in the Riga ghetto. Everyone worried most about Zelig Kalmanovitch.5
Weinreich’s heart sank when he received a coded letter from Emanuel Ringelblum, an eminent historian and communal leader, written in hiding on the Aryan side of Warsaw, and smuggled out by the Polish underground. It was dated March 1, 1944, after the Warsaw ghetto was no more, and it mentioned in passing: “In 1941 and 1942, we were in touch with Zelig Kalmanovitch in Vilna, who under the supervision of the Germans arranged YIVO’s materials and hid a large part of them. Today, there are no more Jews in Vilna. That great center of Yiddish culture and of modern scholarship is totally destroyed.” It was Ringelblum’s last letter. His hiding place was discovered by the Gestapo five days later.6
As soon as Vilna was liberated by the Red Army, on July 13, 1944, Weinreich jumped into action. He wrote to the State Department and asked it to ascertain through diplomatic channels the condition of YIVO’s building in Vilna and the location of its library and archive. The Special War Problems Division responded with a polite brush-off. “As the area in question is still a military zone, the department is not in a position to undertake the desired inquiry.” It suggested that YIVO contact the Soviet Embassy in Washington, since the USSR was in control of Vilna, but Weinreich thought that was a bad idea. It would only alert the Soviets to the importance of the institute’s collections and prompt them to claim the materials as “Soviet property.”
He found a more sympathetic ear at the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas, known for short as the Roberts Commission. Its special adviser, John Walker, urged patience. “Difficult legal and diplomatic questions are involved.” But patience was one thing Weinreich didn’t have much of. YIVO was his child, and he was the sole surviving parent.7
With little concrete information about the condition of the Vilna YIVO and its collections, Weinreich’s hopes were lifted by a surprise envelope he received from Abraham Sutzkever.
Sutzkever had taken bundles of documents from the Shavel Street bunker to Moscow. He was so emotionally invested in the retrieval operation that he needed to hold on to some of its rescued gems. Shmerke and Aba Kovner asked him send them back, or at least send back copies, but he never did.8
Out of the clear blue, Sutzkever found an opportunity to send documents to Weinreich in New York. In December 1944, he was interviewed by a journalist for the New York Post in Moscow, Ella Winter. In the interview, he told Winter about YIVO, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg , the heroic work of the paper brigade, and the recent excavations in Vilna. Noticing her intense reaction, Sutzkever asked Winter, who was about to leave for New York, to take an envelope of materials for Max Weinreich, who was, he explained, YIVO’s sole surviving director and who had rebuilt the institute in America. Winter agreed.
Sutzkever packed the envelope with a document from the archive of Simon Dubnow, an issue of Ghetto News (Geto yediyes), the official newsletter of the Vilna ghetto administration, and a few other items. Not knowing Weinreich’s address or telephone number, he gave her the following instructions: “Take the package to 183 East Broadway, the editorial offices of the Yiddish newspaper The Day (Der Tog), and someone there will give you Max Weinreich’s telephone number. Call him from there and wait. Do not give the package to anyone else, or even mention it to anyone else. Just call and wait, and may God bless you.”9
Winter followed Sutzkever’s instructions, and Weinreich reacted exactly as he had expected. He told her to stay where she was; he would come immediately. Weinreich collected the envelope and, with it, a short note from Sutzkever: “I send you regards from our destruction. Your wife’s mother lived in the ghetto almost the entire two years of its existence. In August 1943, she died in her own bed, the greatest joy for a ghetto-person. . . . I rescued a part of your archive and library. Not everything was preserved in the ground. It’s hard to write. My heart is on the verge of bursting.”10
The letter reestablished the bond between the two men, who had once between teacher and student. Weinreich had headed the Yiddish scouting movement Di Bin (The beetle), where Sutzkever had been a member, and a few years later, Weinreich taught him Old Yiddish so he could write poems in “Shakespearian” Yiddish. Now, one Holocaust later, the student reported to his teacher that he had hidden his private library and papers in the ghetto, and that he had kept an eye on his mother-in-law, Stefania Shabad. But Sutzkever concealed her true fate, probably out of compassion for his reader. Stefania Shabad did not die in her bed in the ghetto. She was deported to the Maidanek death camp.11
Weinreich knew from press reports that parts of YIVO’s collections had been rescued in Vilna. But now, in January 1945, he held a few fragments of its archive in his hands. Upon returning to the YIVO building on West 123rd Street, he invited three members of its leadership into his office: chief librarian Mendl Elkin, historian Jacob Shatzky, and the chairman of YIVO’s academic board, educator Leybush Lehrer, all of them immigrants from Eastern Europe. He unraveled the package, and the four men touched the pages that were, in Sutzkever’s words, “a bloodied reflection of their souls.” They bowed their heads and broke down in tears.
Weinreich did not respond to Sutzkever’s note. He knew that writing to him in Moscow would only alert the Soviet security services to the fact that the celebrity poet from Vilna was in touch with Americans. That could cause serious problems for Sutzkever. So Weinreich did the hardest thing of all, under the circumstances. He was silent and waited.
As the fog of war began to clear, devastating news started to flow into YIVO from survivors of the Vilna ghetto. The institute’s entire staff had been murdered. No one, literally no one who had worked for YIVO and had been in Vilna when the Germans marched in was alive. Weinreich was the only man left standing. It was a chilling realization.
Weinreich dedicated the first postwar issue of yivo bleter to the memory of YIVO’s murdered scholars, staff members, zamlers (collectors), graduate students, and board members. The sixteen-page memorial section was called “Yizkor,” the name of the Hebrew memorial prayer for the dead. “Amidst the destruction of our people, YIVO mourns its own calamity. The community of East European Jews, whose needs gave rise to YIVO, is almost no more. Gone are almost all of YIVO’s thousands of correspondents from hundreds of cities and towns, who served as the foundation of the YIVO structure. Gone are almost all of the people who built YIVO through their daily efforts and imbued it with their body and soul.” “Yizkor” gave biographical portraits of thirty-seven individuals with deep love and pain.
Zelig Kalmanovitch: “This name must stand at the top of the list of the YIVO martyrs who perished at the Germans’ hands. Since 1929, when he returned to Vilna after a hiatus of fifteen years, he was a member of YIVO’s Executive Committee. In 1931, when yivo bleter began publication, he was its editor in chief. But no enumeration of his institutional positions can give a portrait of his radiant personality. You had to know this man, who at age sixty held on to the passion and modesty of his youth. His erudition of the Jewish past and present, of Hebrew and Yiddish, was as vast as his general knowledge. . . . If he was fond of you, you could lean on him like an old oak tree. And he was fond of everyone in whom he saw truthfulness and honesty. Those were his distinguishing characteristics. . . . He had endless love not only for the Jewish people but also for individual Jews. He showed this in the last stage of his life, in the death camp in Estonia, from which he and his wife Riva never returned. There he cared, with loving devotion, for a sick person who had hounded him just a few years earlier. The world exists due to the merit of people like Zelig Kalmanovitch.”
Mark Idelson: “An engineer by profession, and an instructor in the ORT Polytechnic Institute in Vilna, he devoted his free time to YIVO. From the beginning of our institute until the end of our Vilna, he worked in the archives without receiving a penny for his labors.”
Uma (Fruma) Olkenicka: “She came from a well-to-do family where more Russian was spoken than Yiddish. But it was she who built YIVO’s Yiddish theater museum. An artist, she didn’t realize the dreams of her youth. Instead she invested her fine artistic taste into arranging the paintings and photographs on the walls, writing the plaques and signs in the YIVO building, and designing the title pages to YIVO’s publications.”
Meir Bernshtein: “He was YIVO’s accountant. But besides that, he was a supporter and admirer of every Yiddish institution in the city. Reb Meir, as he was called, was the first to donate for a communal cause, even though he made a very meager living.”
Chana Grichanski: “She was a quiet librarian. When YIVO’s reading room first opened, she worked at the circulation desk. But interacting with the people who ordered books was too much for her. She felt more at home making catalog cards.”
Ber Shlosberg: “YIVO was his entire life. For him, carrying boxes was as much a holy labor as reading page proof or translating. When he was asked to write something, he approached the task like a Torah scribe who needs to immerse him in a ritual bath beforehand. Conscientiousness was his most striking trait. His scholarship was only beginning to blossom. He was murdered by the Germans together with his wife and baby.”12
The list went on and on.
Adding to the sense of devastation was the news that the YIVO building on 18 Wiwulskiego Street, the shrine of modern Yiddish culture, was now a pile of rubble. One ardent Vilner who survived the war, Leyzer Ran, sent an envelope to New York with a small pouch of ashes from its ruins. He began the accompanying letter with the words, “On November 20, 1945, I sat shiva at what was once the Yiddish Scientific Institute in Vilna.” The ashes were put on display in a glass case near the entrance to the building on 123rd Street.13
The realization that the Vilna YIVO was no more only added to Weinreich’s urgency to retrieve the remnants of its collections, wherever they could be found.
Besides his deep pain and resolute determination, Weinreich felt something else: burning anger at Germany, the country where he had lived and studied from 1919 to 1923, and the culture he had admired. He had once seen German Wissenschaft (science) as a model and hoped to instill its methods in the Jewish community through YIVO, a Yiddish-speaking academy. But Wissenschaft had betrayed him. It had betrayed basic human values and turned itself into a criminal weapon. Hundreds of professors had put their scholarship in the service of Nazism, and the German academic community had actively participated in the vilification and dehumanization of the Jews. This raised deep existential questions for him. How had that happened? Had he placed too much faith in the value of science for society?
In response to these questions, Weinreich did the only thing he knew how to do. He decided to study the topic. He threw away his linguistic research on the history of Yiddish and, for a year, delved into reading German antisemitic scholarship. The result was a book-length indictment, Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes against the Jewish People. Weinreich became the world’s foremost expert on Judenforschung (antisemitic Jewish studies) and knew everything one could know about the Institute for the Investigation of the Jewish Question in Frankfurt. He read its newsletter and studies; he researched the biographies of its staff. And the more he read, the more he suspected that YIVO’s looted collections were there.
Weinreich never gave up on scholarship as a force that could—and should—ennoble humanity. But he did give up on Germany, totally and absolutely. He avoided contact with German scholars, at least until they gave him a complete reckoning of their activities during the war. He rejected invitations to lecture at German universities. As a linguist, he expressed his quiet fury most profoundly in the sphere of language: for the rest of his life, Weinreich, a native German speaker with a doctorate from Marburg, refused, with rare exceptions, to speak or write in German.14
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Decision to Leave
JUST AS THE Vilna Jewish Museum secured its legal status, it began to collapse, as its staff members rushed to leave the country.
The first one to go was Ruzhka Korczak, Aba Kovner’s close party comrade, and a member of the paper brigade. In October 1944, Kovner sent her on a special mission, to find an opening in the Soviet border with either Poland or Romania for illegal emigration to Palestine. Ruzhka found that all the border crossings were tightly controlled, and once she finally succeeded in getting to the other side, she decided that it was too dangerous to return. She continued onward and reached Haifa port in December—one of the very first survivors from Nazi-occupied Europe to reach the Land of Israel. From there, she wrote excited letters to her friends and comrades back in Vilna.1
Using Ruzhka’s guidelines and precautions, other museum staff members and volunteers from the Young Guard (“Shomer Ha-Tzair”) circle left Vilna for the border—including Dr. Shmuel Amarant and Zelda Treger.
In November, emigrationist fever exploded among the Jews of Vilna. The catalyst was the murder of the lone surviving Jewish family in the town of Ejshishok. This event was followed by a spate of murders of Jews who had returned to their hometowns in search of their relatives and property. When the victims’ corpses were brought to Vilna for burial, people found notes in their pockets with the words, “You will all meet a similar fate.”
The security agencies responded with indifference. The commissar for state security met a Jewish delegation and contemptuously dismissed their demand for protection: “What do you want me to do, station a policeman in front of every house?” Fear and worry spread among the Jewish population.2
At about the same time, official notices appeared on the streets announcing that individuals who had been citizens of the Polish Republic before 1939 could register for “repatriation” to Poland. While the Soviet-Polish agreement concerned mainly ethnic Poles, it also applied to Jews. This meant that native Vilner Jews, who had been Polish citizens before the war, could legally “return home to Poland” and leave for Warsaw or Lodz. Knowing that the Soviet Union did not allow free emigration, hundreds of surviving Vilner Jews jumped at this rare opportunity, including most of the museum’s staff and volunteers. Before long, Avraham Ajzen, Leon Bernstein, Grigorii Yashunsky, and Dr. Alexander Liro were gone. The institution was in a downward spiral.
All of this was topped off by Kovner’s own surprise departure in the dead of night. Ever since the October crisis, when the Commission to Collect and Process Documents of Jewish Culture was dissolved and it looked as if the museum might actually be closed down, Kovner had been removing materials from the premises in order to transfer them to Eretz Israel. He lifted a large stash of FPO documents, including the organization’s most famous appeal “Let us not go like sheep to the slaughter.” He took out a piece of Herman Kruk’s diary and issues of Ghetto News, and set his eyes on the most precious prize all—Herzl’s diary—but was unable to remove it. Shmerke had locked it up in his office.
Kovner did all of his lifting behind Shmerke’s back. The two men, who couldn’t stand each other, had made an agreement back in August not to remove museum materials from the premises. But Kovner had changed his mind when the crisis erupted. As a fervent Zionist, he believed that Jewish culture had a future only in the Land of Israel. From his perspective, the gathering-in of exiled cultural treasures was an important act of nation building. Shmerke, on the other hand, was committed to building Jewish culture in Soviet Vilnius.
