From that Place and Time
A Memoir, 1938-1947
By Lucy Dawidowicz; Edited by Nancy Sinkoff
Rutgers University Press
From that Place and Time is the memoir of Lucy S. Dawidowicz, an American-Jewish historian who set out to study Yiddish language and Jewish history at YIVO, the Jewish Scientific Institute in Vilna, Poland, in 1938. Escaping Poland only days before the Nazi onslaught, she worked in the New York YIVO during the war, and returned to Europe from 1946 to 1947 to aid Jewish displaced persons in Munich and Belsen with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Dawidowicz's memoir not only describes her pre-war year in Jewish Eastern Europe, but also treats the ghostly post-war period, and her role in salvaging what remained of Vilna's scorched Jewish archives and libraries.
Nancy Sinkoff's new introduction explores the historical forces, particularly the dynamic world of secular Yiddish culture, which shaped Dawidowicz's decision to journey to Poland and her reassessment of those forces in the last years of her life.
Lucy Dawidowicz's memoir comprises several books for the price of one: it portrays Jewish Vilna as the plucky American student encountered it in 1938, describes the fate of Jewish cultural treasures as she helped recover them after the War, and exposes the mind and spirit of an intrepid historian-in-the making. Sinkoff's introductory profile of the author is a bonus.
Lucy Dawidowicz was an historian of monumental importance, best known for her classic The War Against the Jews. But she was also a vital chronicler of the world of European Jewry before its destruction. Nancy Sinkoff performs a double service by reintroducing a new generation of readers to Dawidowicz's compelling memoir of Vilna on the brink of destruction and, with her superb introduction, rounding out a portrait of the historian as a young woman. By placing Dawidowicz's personal evolution in its historical and cultural context, Sinkoff has herself performed a grand act of historical reclamation.
Nancy Sinkoff is associate professor of Jewish studies and history at Rutgers University, specializing in the history of Eastern European Jewry. She is the author of Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Yidishkayt and the Making of Lucy S. Dawidowicz
Preface
PART I
1 From New York to Vilna
2 Vilna: A City of the Past
3 Living from Day to Day
4 The YIVO: The Ministry of Yiddish
5 In the Realm of Yiddish: On the Periphery
6 In the Realm of Yiddish: At the Center
7 Rich and Poor, Right and Left
8 Them and Us
9 Flight
PART II
10 New York 1939-1942: War Watch
11 New York 1942-1943: Death Watch
12 New York 1944-1945: The Reckoning
PART III
13 In the Land of Amalek
14 Saving Remnants
Index
Introduction: Yidishkayt and the Making of Lucy S. Dawidowicz
Preface
PART I
1 From New York to Vilna
2 Vilna: A City of the Past
3 Living from Day to Day
4 The YIVO: The Ministry of Yiddish
5 In the Realm of Yiddish: On the Periphery
6 In the Realm of Yiddish: At the Center
7 Rich and Poor, Right and Left
8 Them and Us
9 Flight
PART II
10 New York 1939-1942: War Watch
11 New York 1942-1943: Death Watch
12 New York 1944-1945: The Reckoning
PART III
13 In the Land of Amalek
14 Saving Remnants
Index
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