Yiddish Culture in Wartime, 1939-1945

6 Thursdays: February 11, 18, 25, March 3, 10, 24 Tuition: YIVO Members**:$250 Non-members: $325

Instructor: Prof. Samuel Kassow, Jacob Kronhill Visiting Scholar in East European Jewish History

In the ghettos of Eastern Europe, Jews resisted not only with guns but also with pen and paper. Their amazing story of cultural resistance includes secret archives, theater, street songs, poetry readings and lectures. This course will serve as an introduction to this largely unknown story. We will consider the Ringelblum archive in the Warsaw Ghetto, the Vilna Ghetto theater, the poetry of Avrom Sutzkever, the songs of the Lodz ghetto, the essays of Rachel Auerbach, the reportage of Joseph Zelkowicz and Peretz Opoczynski, as well as other subjects in an effort to better appreciate how the Jews struggled to preserve their dignity in the face of German attempts to crush their morale. The emphasis of this course will be on writings composed in Yiddish. (Course taught in English).

Required texts: 

In Those Nightmarish Days: The Ghetto Reportage of Peretz Opoczynski and Josef Zelkowicz ed. Samuel Kassow

The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe by David Roskies 

Additional readings: 

A Cup of Tears – Abraham Lewin

Israel Lichtenstein’s Testament – from A Holocaust Reader, ed. Lucy Davidowicz

Song of the Murdered Jewish People – Yitzhak Katznelson

The Lead Plates of the Romm Press – Avrom Sutzkever

A Summons to Resistance in the Vilna Ghetto

Lekh Lekha – Simcha Bunem Shayevich

Excerpt from The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania by Herman Kruk (ed. Benjamin Harshav)

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