A Diary of the Nazi Ghetto in Vilna

The Yiddish linguist and historian Zelig Kalmanovitch was born in Goldingen, Courland (now Kuldiga, Latvia). Before World War I, he showed a keen interest in the politics of diaspora nationalism as well as in Yiddish linguistics and literature. In 1919, he received his doctorate from St. Petersburg University, settling in Vilna in 1928 where he became a leader of the YIVO and the editor of its major journal, YIVO-bleter. Kalmanovitch was a major cultural leader of the Vilna ghetto, where he kept a diary in Hebrew in which he questioned the viability of armed resistance and supported Jacob Gens’s policy of buying time through productive labor. This diary was found by Avrom Sutzkever after the war. Deported to labor camps in Estonia in 1943, Kalmanovitch died in the fall of 1944.