Dear Colleagues and Friends,
A photograph portrays a short, solid, older white man standing on his head in the sand. Waves shimmer in the background and break on the beach. Clearly not a body-builder, he is nonetheless adept at standing on his head. You can find David Ben Gurion’s picture on the cover of Volume 9 of The Posen Library of Jewish Civilization and Culture, Catastrophe and Rebirth, 1939–1973, edited by Samuel D. Kassow and David G. Roskies.
Sam and David chose this 1957 photograph by Paul Goldman of Ben Gurion at the beach at Herzliya for the cover. As Sam remarks, it epitomizes the power of their selections for this volume to demonstrate how this era turns history on its head. It is an apt metaphor for how to right a world turned upside down by death and destruction. “If nothing else,” David adds, “it’s very provocative.” And it appropriately introduces a volume of Jewish culture created from 1939 to 1973, which reveals how Jews, like Ben Gurion, managed to stand “the world on its head.”
Volume 9, whose publication we will celebrate on December 1, 2020, with a virtual event at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, begins with an extraordinary 215 pages covering the years 1939–1945 throughout the world. Sam and David start their 963-page volume with selections from the genre of anthologies, acknowledging their own and The Posen Library’s historical connection to a Jewish practice extending across centuries. “If form is content,” they write in their introduction, “then an anthology of arts and letters, culled from two dozen languages and covering all but one continent (Antarctica) is the only form that can do justice to ‘Jewish culture and civilization’ between 1939 and 1973.”
The very first excerpt comes from “Judeo-Arabic Proverbs from Fez,” reminding us of the extraordinary breadth of Jewish culture reflected in this volume. The selection also highlights a sense of a familiar world slipping away—why else publish a translation into French of Judaic-Arabic proverbs? We read: “If the head is alive, it will not want for a hairdo.” In short, the essential thing is to live.
But how one lives Jewishly in a world convulsed by war and genocide is the critical question.
As you read through the different genres represented here—cultural, political, and religious thought, life writing and reportage, fiction, drama, and children’s literature, poetry and popular song—you encounter powerful textual juxtapositions. Because the selections are organized chronologically, the structure exposes how unfamiliar is the familiar.
Everyone knows Anne Frank, but here her diary excerpt follows “The Tragedy of 1st and 2nd June, 1941 in the Capital of Iraq.” How many of us know about the massacre of Baghdad, where “every Jewish house sustained the loss of one of its members, or it had at least had one of them wounded”? Anne Frank’s words, her promise, “If God lets me live, I’ll achieve more than Mother ever did, I’ll make my voice heard, I’ll go out into the world and work for mankind!” reverberates as you read the next harrowing excerpt from “The Czech Transport: A Chronicle of the Auschwitz Sondercommando.” Its concluding words, “The fire burns boldly, calmly. Nothing stands in its way, nothing puts it out. Sacrifices arrive regularly, without number, as though this ancient, martyred nation was created specifically for this purpose.” Reading Anne Frank between these two selections situates her diary in a complex Jewish world confronting catastrophe, her voice one of many.
An evocative wartime painting of a synagogue in Djerba, Tunisia by Jules Lellouche offers a quiet complement to the violence convulsing the world. The recipient of a French government fellowship to study in Paris, Lellouche brought elements of impressionism to his portrait of the synagogue interior.
La Ghriba Djerba, Tunisia (ca. 1944) by Jules Lellouche. Private collection. © Estate of Jules Lellouche.
In our crazy times, it is simultaneously sobering and inspiring to contemplate how Jews managed to right a world turned upside down during years of catastrophe and rebirth. Most of what this remarkable volume contains is available online now—free after registration—on The Posen Digital Library.
Then and now, music and popular song tell our story, too. That was on my mind as we created a short video to introduce readers to the very nontraditional Posen Library. Please take a look at “What Is The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization.” I’d love to know what you think. And here’s an easy link to share with others—http://bit.ly/PosenVid—if you’re so inclined.
Deborah Dash Moore
P.S. So far this fall, we co-hosted four lively and informative virtual events with partner organizations. If you missed any of them, you can now find video recordings of each one on our new Posen Library YouTube Channel. Information about upcoming events you can find on our Events page. And, if you’re active on social media, you can keep up to date with everything The Posen Library is doing by following our posts on Twitter and Facebook.
