The Book Smugglers by David E. Fishman

Author:David E. Fishman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of New England

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Tears in New York

IT WAS MAX WEINREICH’S good fortune and heavy burden to be the only member of the Vilna YIVO’s leadership who was spared from the ravages of the war. He was en route to a linguistics conference in Denmark on September 1, 1939, and remained stranded in Copenhagen for the next few weeks. When his close friend and YIVO colleague Zalmen Rejzen was arrested by the Soviets on September 18, Weinreich decided not to return home. Rejzen was never heard from again. He died in Soviet detention.

With the outburst of war in Europe, the American branch of YIVO became the institute’s temporary headquarters, and its first act was to arrange for Weinreich’s immigration to the United States. He arrived in New York on March 18, 1940, became director, and began to rebuild.

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.

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