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Yiddishist Yarns

\"They didn\'t know I was a Yiddish writer,\" Batt says with a wry smile. \"Publicly I wrote in Ukrainian. But at home I wrote stories in Yiddish, and nobody knew about them; even my family. In my heart I considered myself first and foremost a Yiddish writer.\"
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February 24, 2000

By the middle of 1939, 19-year-old Shmuel “Sam” Batt had already completed a 260-page historical novel, in Hebrew, on the Spanish Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, which he planned to translate into Polish before submitting it for publication. Teachers at Batt’s “Tarbut” school in his native Shumsk, Poland, had earlier predicted that Batt would become a Jewish writer based on both his poetry, inspired by the Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, as well as his prose. Batt’s teachers could not have foreseen how events of the next few years would alter the path of the budding Hebrew writer.

In September 1939 the Nazis invaded Poland, and two weeks later the Soviet Union occupied and annexed the eastern part of the country, making Batt a resident of the USSR, which banned Hebrew as a Zionist language. Due to the dangers of writing in Hebrew, Batt began to write in Ukrainian for local papers, while simultaneously beginning a work of fiction in his mother tongue — Yiddish.

Though Batt’s Hebrew was and remains remarkably proficient for a man raised in Poland, it was in Yiddish that he reached his literary potential. His resulting novel, “In Klem” (In the Fix), which reached 893 handwritten pages, was finished in the spring of 1941 and might have become a classic of Yiddish literature. Conceived as the first in a trilogy, the book traced the evolution of a Jewish tribe which moved from a defeated Judea through Rome, and then to the Jewish kingdom of the Khazars, before settling in Eastern Poland (now Ukraine).

But in June 1941, Batt was forced to flee deeper into the Soviet Union to avoid the advancing German Army, and left his manuscript with his fiancée for safekeeping. When he returned home in 1946 as a member of the victorious Red Army, he found that the young woman, as well as his entire family in Poland, had been exterminated by the Nazis. “Everything I had was incinerated,” he says in a soft Yiddish-accented voice, “I didn’t even have my manuscript.”

Emotionally incapable of either rewriting his novel or penning any new Yiddish works in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Batt took the opportunity as a veteran of the war to enroll in the law school at Lvov University in the Ukraine. Though he did not know it at that time, the career change might have saved his life. After receiving his law degree, Batt took a job as an attorney, defending, among others, Ukrainian nationalists accused of plotting and waging a clandestine war against the Soviet government.

The cases were mostly losers, and those convicted were usually sent to Siberia where they often did not survive. Batt defended them to the best of his ability, and in order to defend the accused at the tribunals run by the feared Soviet security service — the NKVD (later to become the KGB) — he was required to join the Communist Party.

It was this devotion to his law practice which probably saved Batt’s life. In 1952, a paranoid Joseph Stalin ordered the execution of 24 Yiddish writers following a clandestine trial in the Lubianka prison on trumped up charges that they were enemies of the Soviet government. Their murders effectively deprived Soviet Jewry of its cultural elite. Though very few Yiddish writers survived the purge, Batt was among them.

“They didn’t know I was a Yiddish writer,” Batt says with a wry smile. “Publicly I wrote in Ukrainian. But at home I wrote stories in Yiddish, and nobody knew about them; even my family. In my heart I considered myself first and foremost a Yiddish writer.”

Batt’s Yiddish self would stay hidden until 1957 when he was able to move back with his family to his native Poland, where the atmosphere for the Jews was a little more open. That year Batt became a regional editor of the Folks Sztyme, the only Yiddish daily then operating in Poland. While working for the paper, he wrote approximately eight articles, stories and essays a month, many of which were reprinted in Yiddish newspapers in New York, Paris and Buenos Aires. At the same time, Batt continued to practice law.

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