In The Yiddish Historians and the Struggle for a Jewish History of the Holocaust, Mark L. Smith has written a compelling historiographic study of a tight-knit circle of five survivors who dedicated themselves to writing the history of the Holocaust in Yiddish. The five “Yiddish historians” are Philip Friedman, Isaiah Trunk, Nachman Blumental, Joseph Kermish, and Mark Dworzecki. The first four examined the Holocaust primarily in Poland; Dworzecki, a physician by training, studied the Holocaust in his native Vilna, yet many of his publications address medical issues ranging from the efforts of Jewish doctors in the Vilna ghetto to the psychological effects of the Holocaust on survivors. All five threw themselves into their research immediately after liberation, and, with the exception of Kermish, they wrote practically to the last breath. Historians of the Holocaust continue to consult Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust, a posthumous collection of articles by Friedman, and Trunk's Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation. Only cognoscenti know the names of Blumental, Kermish, and Dworzecki. To his credit, Smith not only frames the contributions of these five historians to Holocaust research, but also recovers the scholarship of Blumental, Kermish, and Dworzecki from semi-oblivion, while burnishing the well-established reputations of Friedman and Trunk.Footnote ¹

These men, Smith argues, constituted “a cohort of scholars whose principal bonds as historians were with each other throughout their postwar years and who shared a research agenda that transcended their individual efforts” (21). They embraced Yiddish, the ancestral language of the Jews of eastern Europe whose history under Nazi impact they were retelling. Unlike most contemporary historians, they studied the Holocaust from the perspective of Jews rather than the perpetrators, focusing their research on the internal history of Jews, particularly “Jewish existence in the ghettos” (68) in all its forms. They contested the stereotype of Jewish passivity under Nazi rule. They argued that Jews, in their attempt to apply useful historical lessons from past experience with a hostile environment, exercised agency, drawing on the limited resources available to them in their confrontation with Nazism. For Trunk, this approach led him to situate the dilemma of Jewish Councils—the choice between accommodation and agonizing attempts to save a remnant of the Jewish community—in the context of Jewish history. In other words, the Yiddish historians explored continuities rather than ruptures in Jewish history in order to explain Jews’ responses to Nazi oppression. To this end, they consulted Jewish sources, testimonies, and documents alike that other historians overlooked or dismissed. Finally, rather than operate in an ivory tower, they produced scholarship accessible to literate lay readers—in this case, mostly Yiddish-speaking survivors from eastern Europe. Smith describes the ultimate goal of the Yiddish historians in eloquent terms. “We know from their works,” Smith writes, “that these historians devoted themselves immediately after the Holocaust to studying the Jewish struggle to sustain life” (318).

This is an important book. Laura Jockusch, Boaz Cohen, and others have highlighted the remarkable undertaking of Jewish historical commissions in postwar Europe and of Ghetto Fighters’ House and Yad Vashem in the nascent State of Israel, respectively, to document the Holocaust. Critical to this endeavor was collecting survivor testimony.Footnote ² Smith builds on the research of these scholars, showing that the Yiddish historians, apart from their association with the historical commissions in Poland and DP camps and then with either YIVO in New York or the Ghetto Fighters’ House and Yad Vashem, productively integrated the Holocaust with Jewish history in their writings. Moreover, their scholarship was relevant to a Jewish lay public. In both respects, they were ahead of their time.Footnote ³ Their prolific output in the form of books, articles appearing in both scholarly publications and the popular Yiddish press, public speeches, and radio interviews reinforces the argument of Hasia Diner and others that the Holocaust was not enveloped in a conspiracy of silence in the postwar world,Footnote ⁴ at least not among “Yiddish-speaking survivors … within their own public sphere” (117).

This book provokes questions. One is the absence of women in the group of Yiddish historians. Smith attributes their absence to “an accident of history and a reflection of their time” (40). Nevertheless, weren't there any women who might have been included in this cohort, at least at its edges? Lucy Dawidowicz may not have written in Yiddish, but she spoke Yiddish, adopted the same methodology as the book's male protagonists, published important books and articles on the Holocaust, and participated in public discourse.Footnote ⁵ For all intents and purposes, she functioned like Smith's Yiddish historians—albeit in English. Friedman was the Yiddish historians’ avatar, yet only half of his postwar published output was in Yiddish. Moreover, all five left Europe in the immediate postwar period. But what about historians of the Holocaust who remained in Poland and wrote in Yiddish as well as Polish? I have in mind Ber Mark, Szymon Datner, and Tatiana Berenstein—the vanguard of the Jewish Historical Institute (ŻIH) in Warsaw. According to Smith, they were separated from the mainstream of Holocaust historiography and had only intermittent contacts with colleagues in the West. This is not entirely accurate, as historians such as Stephan Stach and Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov have shown. Moreover, Stach and Nalewajko-Kulikov, among others, argue that the later writings of Mark and his colleagues at the ŻIH, especially their publications after 1956, are more substantial than students of Holocaust historiography assume.Footnote ⁶

All things considered, however, these lacunae do not detract from the significance of Smith's book. It has expanded the historiographical field of vision. In pursuit of a full understanding of Jewish life within the Nazi orbit, especially in eastern Europe, scholars cannot now help, thanks to Smith's masterly exposition, but seriously take into account the works of the Yiddish historians.