Summary
The majority of documents gathered in this volume are literary works, whose authors and editors are Jewish writers and journalists – Oneg Shabat members and collaborators. For reasons of secrecy, the majority of them signed their works with pseudonyms, code names or initials, i.e. Zalman Skałow – „Groyl” (Yid. dread), Nekhemia Tytelman – „N. Rokheles” (Yid. son of Rokhl), Yitzhak Berensztein – „Y. Ber.”, Yehuda Feldwurm – Yehuda Feld.
The first part of the volume comprises of sources documenting the history of cultural life in the Warsaw Ghetto. They are mainly pamphlets and various prints: invitations, posters announcing theatre performances, concerts and other events taking place in the ghetto. There are also reports on cultural life, commissioned by Ringelblum. One of them, an essay entitled Varshe vaylt zikh… [Yid. Warsaw is having fun…], is a history of theatre in the ghetto written by the well-known actor and theatre director Yonas Turkow. Further insight into the ghetto’s cultural life is provided by a questionnaire created by Emanuel Ringelblum for the project „Two and a half Years”. Responses of several Jewish leading intellectuals are preserved in the Archive, including: Hillel Cejtlin, Jehoshua Perle, Aron Einhorn, Shmul Stupnicki, Israel Milejkowski, Henryk Rozen, Edward Stein.
The second part of the volume opens with a chapter including poems written both by professional authors and amateurs, as well as anonymous songs and rhymed pieces, mainly for the ghetto theatre stages. The authors include famous Yiddish and Hebrew poet Yitzhak Kacenelson, and Polish poet Władysław Szlengel, who often described life in the ghetto in a satirical tone. While in general the Ringelblum Archive publication series does not include pre-war works preserved in the Archive (such as Itzik Manger collection deposited by Rachel Auerbach) unless written by Oneg Shabat members and its close collaborators, we chose to make an exception for the pre-war poems of Rachel Korn, Kalman Lis and Shmuel Marwil.
The next chapter contains works of prose, written almost exclusively by professional writers and journalists, among them Yehuda Feldwurm, Yosef Kirman, Shmuel
