Footnotes written by the author, Bernard Goldstein, are marked “—BG”; footnotes provided by Dr. Martyna Rusiniak-Karwat are marked “—MR”; footnotes written by me are marked “—MZ.”
Wherever possible, and in almost every case, I followed the YIVO convention for transliterating Yiddish words.
I have once in a while translated rather freely, departing somewhat from Goldstein’s literal text. As every translator knows, hewing too closely to the words and phrases of the original will often result in obscurity, unintelligibility, and awkward expression.
I have generally spelled place names and the names of individuals who lived in interwar Poland as they would have been spelled in Polish. However, I have not consistently followed this guideline, especially when a different spelling is already standard in English (e.g., Warsaw), or in specific cases involving Bundists who ultimately moved to the US (such as Sherer and Goldstein) and who Anglicized their names.
In Yiddish, Polish place names and the names of individuals are most often pronounced differently from the way they are pronounced in Polish. Since Yiddish spells these names phonetically, there is no way to tell from the Yiddish original how these names are spelled in Polish. To render them with the proper Polish spelling, I had the great help of Zenon Neumark and Dr. Martyna Rusiniak-Karwat, to whom I want to express my deepest appreciation and thanks (if there are still misspellings, the fault is mine, not theirs). Dr. Rusiniak-Karwat was also able to update the names of streets, where they had changed, and to indicate what other changes had taken place to some of the locations mentioned. These changes are noted in the footnotes.