Summary 854
Szajnkinder, Jehoshua Perle, Nekhemia Tytelman and Zalman Skałow. Their works mainly document everyday life in the ghetto, their stories originating from both their own experiences and testimonies of others. Probably the most personal of these is Leyb Goldin’s Kronik fun mes-les [Yid. Chronicle of one night].
It is followed by dramas written in the ghetto. These plays aimed at reflecting ghetto reality, while at the same time allowing their audience to escape it. They too are varied. Among them is a Polish-language light comedy Miłość szuka mieszkania [pol. Love is looking for a lodging], which drew crowds when performed in the popular Femina theatre and is a very interesting source for the multilingualism of ghetto inhabitants. Yitzhak Kacenelson’s tragedy Hiob is an attempt to read a biblical story in the context of the ghetto reality.
The sixth chapter consists of ethnographic materials: jokes, sayings and forecasts heard on ghetto streets. These were gathered and recorded by Rabbi Shimon Huberband or Nekhemia Tytelman. They show us both coping strategies of the ghetto community and how keenly aware their authors were of events taking place just outside the ghetto and on the faraway fronts of the war.
The third part of this volume contains the full contents of an anthology Payn un gvure [yid. Martyrdom and Heroism] published by a Zionist youth organization Dror in the summer of 1940. The anthology opens with a fragment of Shalom Asch’s novel Kiddush ha-Shem, followed by fragments of medieval chronicles portraying martyrdom of German Jews during the crusades, testimonies of Cossack uprisings and descriptions of Jewish self-defence during the pogroms. Next to historical chronicles and prose, there is poetry from medieval piyutim (Jewish liturgical poems) to modern poetry written by Zionist authors such as Shaul Czernichowski, Chaim Nachman Bialik and Yitzhak Lamdan. The anthology also contains a fragment of Mikołaj Miński’s play, Oblężenie Tulczyna [Pol. The Siege of Tulczyn], which contrasts two key motives visible in Payn un gvure: martyrdom and active self-defence.
