3 The New York YIVO in Wartime

Back in the United States

In August 1940, having spent an unremarkable year living in New York City and in Albany, where she had landed a civil service job upon her return to the United States, Lucy Schildkret received a call that proved as fateful as her decision to go to Poland two years earlier. Weinreich had been able to make his way to New York from Copenhagen. Planning to transfer the YIVO’s main activities to the Amopteyl, the American branch of the institution, he needed a secretary and wanted someone who offered continuity with the Vilna YIVO.1 For the next six years, Weinreich and Lucy worked directly together on all of the YIVO’s work, effecting a personal transnational tie with prewar Vilna. This role placed Lucy directly at the center of some of the earliest scholarly efforts on US soil to analyze the fate of the Jews under German occupation, inform the world of what had befallen them, and begin the process of historicizing what would later be called the khurbn by Yiddish-speaking Jews and the Holocaust by English speakers.2 It also allowed her to continue working at the “Ministry of Yiddish” with its intense commitment to the Yiddish language, and with Weinreich, “the Master of Vilna.”3

The Amopteyl leased the YIVO’s first New York headquarters on Lafayette Street in Lower Manhattan in a building that was a far cry from the imposing modern edifice on Wiwulski Street in Vilna. The architecture and setting highlighted the precarious state in which the institute found itself. In the critical period of Lithuanian rule between October 1939 and June 1940, the YIVO’s temporary administration in Vilna, composed of Kalmanovitch, with Weinreich contributing what he could from Copenhagen, remained ambivalent about formally transferring the institution to New York. For Weinreich, giving up Vilna as the YIVO’s headquarters meant acknowledging that Eastern Europe could no longer be viewed as the center of the Ashkenazic diaspora. The YIVO activists in New York, however, asserted their scholarly agenda. In January 1940, they held a conference, sponsoring papers on American Jewry and its social history. Soon thereafter YIVO bleter (January–February 1940) appeared for the first time under the Amopteyl’s auspices.4 The institute also launched the bilingual newsletter Yedies fun YIVO (YIVO News, later renamed News of the YIVO) to document its growing activity in both Yiddish and English.

Weinreich came to New York with his son Uriel in mid-March 1940 on a fund-raising mission. Far from reconciled about being transplanted to New York and bolstered by Kalmanovitch’s uncharacteristic optimism about the vibrancy of the YIVO under the Lithuanians, Weinreich planned to return to Vilna in the fall. World events intervened. In mid-June 1940, the Red Army reentered Vilna, and by the summer Lithuania had been annexed by the Soviet Union. Vilna—and the rest of Lithuania—experienced rapid Sovietization, and any vestige of the YIVO’s autonomy was quickly annulled. Kalmanovitch’s hatred for the Soviet regime was no secret, and the YIVO’s leadership was quickly transferred to Marxists, including Moshe Lerer and Noah Pryłucki.5 The staff at the Amopteyl was able to secure a visa to the United States for Kalmanovitch and his wife, Rivele, but, holding out to immigrate to Palestine to join their only child, Shalom, who had left Europe in the fall of 1938, they were caught in the maelstrom of the Nazi invasion. Kalmanovitch later perished in a labor camp in Estonia and Rivele in the pits of Ponar.6

In New York, Weinreich got to work with his customary tirelessness. One of his most important projects was completing an authoritative bibliography of the YIVO’s publications from its beginnings in 1925 until 1941. The project, begun in 1939 to commemorate the YIVO’s fifteenth anniversary by aspirantn in Lucy’s cohort under the stewardship of Ber Schlossberg and Chana Piszczacer, remained incomplete.7 Working again with Weinreich, Lucy continued the effort of her Vilna peers. Appearing in 1943, the YIVO bibliografye cataloged more than thirty thousand pages of academic material published in books, journals, and pamphlets. Weinreich’s understated introduction to the volume underscored the transnational significance of the bond between the Vilna YIVO and the New York YIVO and Lucy’s role in the endeavor:

In New York, we started this project anew. Libe Shildkret from New York was also among the aspirantn in Vilna who participated in the work [and] . . . has been working in the New York Aspirantur since we renewed it here in 1940. Miss Shildkret recataloged the entire material according to the principles that had been elaborated earlier and added the publications from 1940 and 1941; she also finished the complicated technical work of preparing the manuscript for offset. The fact that a young colleague from the YIVO prepared this work here and there (do un dortn) underscores for me the continuity in the YIVO’s entire enterprise.8

During the war years the YIVO became a site of continuity with secular East European Jewish scholarship in the United States. As Lucy noted in her memoir, the influx of Polish Jewish immigrants enriched Jewish scholarship in the United States with a distinctive European perspective for several decades.9 The YIVO now boasted a significant cadre of scholars, including Jacob Shatzky, Raphael Mahler, Yudl Mark, Judah Joffee, Shmuel Niger, Israel Knox, Roman Jakobson, Jacob Lestchinsky, Abraham G. Duker, Nathan Reich, Rachel Wischnitzer-Bernstein, and Joseph Opatoshu, among numerous others working in New York City. Elias Tcherikower, the head of the YIVO’s Historical Section, and his wife, Riva, came from Paris in the summer of 1940. A year later, the Tcherikowers helped Szajke Frydman (later Zosa Szajkowski), a Polish Jew who worked as a journalist in the Parisian Yiddish press in the 1920s, come to New York. He quickly joined the Aspirantur under Weinreich’s stewardship.10 The YIVO also became a haven for a group of “political” European Jews, Mensheviks and Bundists in danger from both the Nazi and Soviet regimes. Another stream of refugees, lucky recipients of emergency political visas secured through the efforts of Varian Fry, a volunteer for the Emergency Rescue Committee, and the intervention of the Jewish Labor Committee with Secretary of State Cordell Hull, arrived soon thereafter.11 An estimated two thousand refugees entered the United States between 1940 and 1941, some with the aid of Chiune “Sempo” Sugihara, who helped ten thousand Jews leave Lithuania. These refugees, along with the Yiddish-speaking American staff of the Amopteyl, were acutely aware of the steady strangulation of Jewish life in Europe. They read the Yiddish press, filled with terrifying reports of the massacres of Jews gleaned from the underground press and from the Polish government-in-exile in London.12 In 1939–41, America was still gripped by isolationism and a sense of distance from the European stage. At the New York YIVO the war was anything but far away.

Lucy was particularly worried by the situation facing her friends and loved ones in Poland, now occupied by the Germans and the Soviets. Daily contact with the recent refugees allowed her to experience both a sense of continuity with her prewar year and a feeling of doom about the future. The vulnerability of the YIVO’s library and archive, of Vilna’s Jews—especially the Kalmanovitches—and of Warsaw under the Nazis were the focus of her worry. Warsaw’s Jews were the first to be ghettoized behind a prisonlike wall. The YIVO bleter of November–December 1940 featured an article on Warsaw, and Lucy was charged with drawing the ghetto’s outline onto the city’s map.13

She also honed her writing in YIVO bleter, contributing several articles in 1941, including “Anti-Nazi Literature” in its May–June issue.14 At the YIVO’s sixteenth conference on January 11, 1942, Shlomo Mendelsohn, a Bundist, journalist, and Jewish educator, read a paper on the horrifying condition of Warsaw’s Jews under the Nazis.15 He had become a main source of information about Warsaw’s Jews through his contacts with the Bund and the Polish underground. By June 1942, definitive news of the systematic murder of Polish Jewry reached the West via reports by Shmuel A. Zygielbaum, a Polish-Jewish socialist who had arrived in New York that year on an emergency visa, and by Ignacy Schwartzbart, a Polish Zionist. Both men were members of the Polish government-in-exile in London.

Lucy would be increasingly obsessed with the dire condition faced by Warsaw Jewry as the war marched on. Sometime in 1942, she met Szymon Dawidowicz, a Bundist political refugee who had immigrated to the United States in 1940 on an emergency visa from Moscow and had come to work at the YIVO as a copy editor.16 His wife and two children, Zarek and Tobtsche, remained behind in Warsaw, incarcerated and starving in the ghetto.17

As news poured in of European Jews caught in the path of the Wehrmacht and the Einsatzgruppen, protests were organized in New York, often held at Madison Square Garden. Lucy later described the atmosphere at the YIVO in late 1942 as a “protracted Yom Kippur, a time of fasting and mourning” for the Jews of Europe.18 In the spring of the next year, the institute was on edge, having received news that the remaining Jews in Warsaw—roughly 55,000 out of a ghettoized population of 450,000—had readied themselves for armed resistance. By late April 1943, news of the Ghetto Uprising and of the Nazis’ burning of the ghetto as retribution became public. The events had direly personal implications for the YIVO community. “The people I knew had lost children, wives, parents, their dearest friends,” Lucy would write.19 Szymon could only assume that his family had perished. He later learned that his daughter, Tobtsche, caught in the burning sewers of the ghetto, could not escape because of a twisted ankle.20 In her memoir, Lucy would movingly—yet discreetly—describe her future husband’s grief: “One friend mourned his daughter, a member of the resistance organization, who had died during the fighting. I went to pay a condolence call. . . . Other visitors were there. But he didn’t speak to anyone. He lay on his bed, his face turned to the wall. For three days, he didn’t eat, drink, or speak.”21

In addition to her other YIVO duties, Lucy took on the role of managing editor of Yedies, becoming deeply involved with the effort to commemorate the East European Jewish dead while researching their culture, language, and history. Yedies’s February 1944 issue announced an exhibit of photographs of interwar Warsaw Jewry by Roman Vishniac. The photographs, taken under the auspices of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee from 1935 to 1938, depicted Polish Jewry as a community wracked with poverty and living on the edge of destruction.22 That issue also reported that Shlomo Mendelsohn read a paper titled “Resistance in the Polish Ghettos,” which “evoked intense emotion among the listeners” and “upon the spontaneous request of someone in the audience, Kaddish [the Jewish prayer for the dead] was recited by Rabbi Leo Reichel.”23

Though the term khurbn forshung (research on destruction) would not be coined until after the war, the New York YIVO had of necessity turned toward it to begin the process of documenting, analyzing, and publicizing the destruction of the European Jews. Khurbn forshung’s historiographic mission included several goals: meeting a moral obligation to bear witness, amassing evidence that could be used in future trials, and writing history as an act of commemoration.24 Yet, as Laura Jockusch notes, many of the survivors also saw themselves as “part of a distinct eastern European Jewish tradition of history writing as a response to catastrophe according to which documenting anti-Jewish violence and persecution equaled armed resistance in its significance and honorability.”25 Khurbn forshung aspired to the highest levels of academic rigor and objectivity even as it became enlisted in the efforts to secure justice for the murdered after the war.

The YIVO played a central role in presenting the Holocaust to the New York public in the war’s bitter final year and immediate aftermath. Its many ties to Poland influenced the institution’s core mission.26 The September 1944 Yedies announced plans to publish Jacob Shatzky’s history of the Jews of Warsaw “in connection with the tragic fate of Polish Jews in the present war.”27 It also gave the first inkling that some of the YIVO’s rich repository of Yiddish and Jewish culture might have survived, reporting that Avrom Sutzkever, a poet, a YIVO activist, and a partisan who had survived in the Soviet Union with a group of the YIVO’s personnel, had smuggled precious documents in and out of the ghetto.28

Trouble on the YIVO’s Home Front

By 1943, Lucy’s relationship with the YIVO had begun to sour. The reasons are not completely clear. In a letter to her sister, Eleanor, that March, she complained that she had gotten “fed up with them” and was seeking a position that would pay at least thirty-five dollars per week.29 Yet letters from Zosa Szajkowski to Elias and Riva Tcherikower confirm that she remained at the YIVO through October 1945, though not very happily. In Szajke’s view, the problem was that she had been turned into “a mere clerk.” He commented further that “if she had spent any time on her doctoral thesis, she might have become an academic herself and wouldn’t be leaving YIVO.”30 Szajke and Lucy were twins of a sort. Both had been aspirantn, Lucy in Vilna in 1938, Szajke in New York in 1941. Both were deeply enmeshed in the YIVO yet fiercely independent. Inducted into the US Army in January 1943, Szajke helped recover missing documents from the YIVO archive as well as records of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry, which he donated to the YIVO. Both he and Lucy were practicing historians who, because they never earned PhDs, were viewed by many as amateurs. They appear to have had a close if occasionally contentious friendship at the YIVO during the war. In his letters to the Tcherikowers and to Riva after Elias’s premature death in 1943, Szajke mentions “Libe” numerous times, commenting on her moodiness, joking about her affection for hats and shoes, asking Riva to request that Libe send him pens, copies of articles, and other YIVO materials, and telling Riva to inform Libe that he saved some silk parachute material for both of them to make into scarves.31 Hoping to complete a bibliography of Elias Tcherikower’s work, he wrote to Riva that he wanted Lucy to be on the project. “I can’t see another person who could do it.”32 Letters to Max Weinreich in July and October 1943 from Saul Reisen, Zalman’s son—who with his father was arrested by the Soviets in 1940 but survived imprisonment and received amnesty granted to Polish citizens after the Nazis abrogated the Hitler-Stalin pact—also inquired after Libe and expressed regret that a letter she sent never arrived.33 These letters attest to the impression the young Lucy made at the skeletal YIVO during the war years.

A major rupture occurred between Lucy and the YIVO, and specifically between Lucy and Weinreich, in the late spring of 1946, one that propelled her to consider working for the JDC in occupied Germany. There does not appear to have been one precipitating event.34 In the summer of 1946, Leibush Lehrer wrote to Weinreich to tell him that Lucy had come up to Camp Boiberik specifically “to explain her behavior.” He also chastised Weinreich for not giving him a full account of what had caused her to leave.35 Weinreich wrote back a four-page explanatory letter, enumerating in sixteen bullet points his surprise that Lucy had gone to see Lehrer at Boiberik, his skepticism that she herself fully understood why she had left, and then his more specific appraisal of her work, detailing her shortcomings. Citing staff squabbles and clashes of ego, he noted that “she was an element of friction among the employees.” “Libe has a tendency to be bossy,” he commented, adding, “There isn’t enough effort [on her part] to assess that the interests of the Institute demand that she control herself as much as possible.” Ultimately, he told Lehrer that a combination of factors led him to decide that “Libe does not suit us” now but that

She has too many brilliant qualities [to disqualify her returning to the YIVO]. I have a feeling that after her sojourn in Europe, she may once again want to come to us, and we will be very interested in having her. If Libe had remained, we would have had to settle the problem. . . . But if she is away, it is as though a bridge had been washed out. One would rebuild the old bridge, [but] the new one [can be built] from scratch.36

In her memoir, Lucy claimed that Weinreich viewed her decision to leave the YIVO as a kind of apostasy, one that irrevocably changed their relationship.37 Whatever the precise cause of the fissure, the impact they had on each other’s lives—and on the transfer of Yiddish scholarship and the YIVO’s institutional body to New York—was incalculable. Both remained bound by the profound awareness that the world of East European Jewry in which the YIVO had been born was utterly destroyed.38 Many years later, Dina Abramowicz remarked to Dawidowicz, “Your collaboration with Weinreich proved to be extremely important to both of you—no wonder that your separation was rather painful to him. But you give him his due in your book—who better than you could see his genius and accomplishments!”39 Dawidowicz would honor Weinreich in several of her future publications, including serving as an organizing member of the editorial board for his Festschrift.40

Having left the YIVO in the late spring of 1946, Lucy was without work and once again adrift. She had returned to Columbia University to take courses in history toward a master’s degree, building on the research she had done on the Anglo-Yiddish press in Vilna in 1938–39. When she decided to return to Europe as an educational worker for the JDC, she approached Salo W. Baron, her Columbia adviser, for a letter of recommendation. Citing her qualifications, she noted, “What I think should be most emphasized is [my] knowledge of Jewish life, history, and literature, and of Yiddish and the ability to apply this knowledge to practical purposes: planning of courses, subjects to study, assistance in obtaining sources for cultural programs (theatricals, musicals, readings, etc.), and, of course, journalistic work.”41 Baron did not hesitate to recommend her.42 She thanked him, and in a subsequent letter she expressed the hope that her departure did not mean the end of her formal studies. She also articulated her desire to switch her field from European to American Jewish history.43

Appointed as an educational officer of the JDC in July, Lucy sailed to Europe in September 1946, bound for France on the SS Marine Perch.44 Yedies announced Lucy’s new position in its September issue, reporting that “Miss Lucy Schildkret, secretary to the Research Director of the Yivo, is now in Europe as a member of the JDC staff in charge of cultural work among Jewish Displaced Persons in the United States occupied zones of Germany and Austria.”45 In anticipation of her arrival, Koppel Pinson, a historian from Queens College and a YIVO activist who was working for the JDC as the director of education and culture for the Jewish displaced persons, cabled Lucy with a last-minute request: “MOST PRESSING NEED NOW FOR TEXTS SECULAR SUBJECTS FOR LARGE NUMBER CHILDREN FROM POLAND STOP BRING THESE AND TOYS AND WRITING MATERIALS IN EXCESS BAGGAGE.”46

In her memoir, Dawidowicz telescoped the years 1943–46, emphasizing her struggle to reckon with the catastrophic nature of what had befallen European Jewry as a whole, East European Jewry in particular, and her beloved friends in Vilna individually. Restrained grief and expressed rage shaped chapter 12, “New York, 1944–1945: The Reckoning”: “I couldn’t stand to read about it [the Nazi campaign of mass murder], but I did. We all read the newspaper reports, but we never spoke about them. I was deafened by the silent screaming inside my head.”47 Returning to Europe in 1946, she would be confronted directly by the results of the war: the deafening silence of the complete absence of Polish Jewish civilization.