Mark Dworzecki was a medical doctor from Poland before the Holocaust. But after surviving the Vilna Ghetto and several concentration camps, he settled in Paris, where he found a different calling.
“Those who disappeared have commanded us: Tell!” he wrote in the fall of 1948.
That’s precisely what he proceeded to do. Along with a group of professional and lay historians, all Jews writing in Yiddish, Dworzecki worked to record the Holocaust and frame it within the arc of Jewish history.
But because their work was written in Yiddish, a language that few mainstream historians understood, the academic community largely ignored it, leaving it to languish in obscurity.
A new dissertation from a doctoral student in UCLA’s History Department aims to correct that oversight.
Mark Smith, who wrote the 536-page dissertation “The Yiddish Historians and the Struggle for a Jewish History of the Holocaust,” is an unlikely candidate for the re-enshrining of five Yiddish historians into the canon of Holocaust history.
An architect by profession, Smith, 58, is by his own admission an “other-than-customary graduate student.”
His project grew out of a passion for the Yiddish language. About two decades ago, he began collecting all the Yiddish works he could get his hands on, motivated by an impulse to save them from obscurity and destruction.
The ones that spoke to him most directly were the histories.
The Yiddish chroniclers of the Holocaust wrote from the perspective of victims — a radical departure from other early Holocaust historians, who relied heavily on German sources and thus focused almost entirely on the Nazis, Smith explained. For his dissertation, for which he received final approval earlier this year, Smith narrowed the authors to five historians, including Dworzecki.
Coming in without any preconceived notions, Smith read hundreds of works by these authors and “simply let them speak to me.”
What emerged was a group of writers electing through their language choice to speak to a particular audience.
“This is not just a trivial fact of language, but in fact it represents a deliberate choice,” Smith told the Journal.
He added, “It was a worldwide community of Yiddish speakers to whom they were addressing themselves.”
Choosing to write in the Jewish tongue not only allowed these historians to better integrate source materials written in that language, but also to employ a particularly Yiddish sensibility and vocabulary.
For instance, they refer to the Nazi canon as “Hitler’s Toyre,” Yiddish for Torah, Smith said — a shocking oxymoron for those unschooled in the language, but natural for somebody used to describing the world in a Jewish vocabulary.
“The German beast, the German hangman, the German monster,” Smith said. “These are things you would never say in English, but which in Yiddish are not overblown; they’re the common way of expression.”
The same choice, however, that allowed them to engage their linguistic history and background condemned their Yiddish works to relative obscurity.
“The assumption is it took somewhere between 20 to 30 years after the Holocaust for significant historical research to be devoted to the topic [of Jewish life during the Holocaust],” said David Myers, a UCLA professor of Jewish history and Smith’s thesis adviser.
Smith also worked under Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust historian Saul Friedlander, as Friedlander’s last student before retiring.
Smith’s dissertation will force historians of the Holocaust to revise their understanding of the field, Myers said.
Myers admits that when Smith first stepped into his office more than a decade ago, he greeted the newcomer with the “requisite caution and suspicion.” Smith runs his own architecture firm, specializing in complex hillside projects, and Myers warned him that graduate study is itself a full-time job.
The architect soon “proved to be a more than occasional student with a passing interest in Jewish history,” Myers said. (According to Smith, “David was kind enough to entertain a very unlikely prospect.”)
Myers said Smith’s work shows that the five historians he focused on — Dworzecki, Isaiah Trunk, Philip Friedman, Joseph Kermish and Nachman Blumental — anticipated several later developments in Holocaust history.
For instance, they pioneered the idea that though few Jewish victims of the Holocaust were able to participate in armed resistance, many found other ways to resist the Nazi ideology, including spiritual and economic resistance, Smith said.
“The idea that resistance is only by force of arms is wrong — it’s not a Jewish idea,” he said.
For instance, in a 1946 essay, “Varied Were the Ways,” which Smith translated for his dissertation, Dworzecki recalls as an example of spiritual resistance “the rabbi who went to the Estonian concentration camp with a Torah scroll wrapped around his body, and so worked while digging and carrying burdens and daily awaited being caught at the gate with his concealed load.”
Historians later came around to the idea that even though Holocaust-era Jews didn’t necessarily take up arms in great numbers, they did not go as sheep to the slaughter, an idea anticipated by the people Smith calls “my historians.”
The historians highlighted in Smith’s dissertation transcended boundaries that have since been imposed on the study of the Jewish genocide.
“Generally speaking, most historians who write about the Holocaust are not also Jewish historians,” Smith said. “Both fields are very large, and you have to specialize, and you don’t specialize in both.”
But his historians, he argues in the dissertation, were involved in precisely that undertaking: locating the Holocaust in its tragic but natural place within Jewish history.
The Jewish telling of history, he explained, involves conceptualizing events within a Jewish frame of understanding. As an example, he used the burning of Jewish books. In a German view of history, book burning was an ecumenical tradition that began with Martin Luther’s burning of Catholic works and flared up in the early 20th century with Jewish books.
But from a Jewish perspective, Nazi book burnings are part of a different tradition: “What Jews understand is when you begin to burn Jewish books, the next likely thing to happen was that you burn Jews,” Smith said, based long experience of persecution.
Jewish books are precisely where Smith’s story as a historiographer begins. Walking into a thrift shop to donate some clothing a little over two decades ago, he came across a shelf of books written in Hebrew script that clearly were not Hebrew, and thought to himself, “This must be Yiddish.” On a whim, he bought one.
“I came back and bought the rest of the books they had in Yiddish — which was a dozen more books at 50 cents apiece — and I said I’m going to teach myself to read this language,” he said. “And so I did.”
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