Samuel Kassow Presents a Virtual Jewish Book Council Author Talk about his translation of Warsaw Testament, by Rokhl Auerbach
Thursday, November 21 at 7pm on Zoom
Co-hosted by Falmouth Jewish Congregation and the Worcester JCC
Open to the public and free of charge, but registration is required to access this Zoom event.
Click here to register: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEpd-GhpjgqH9z4XwFP6Zm7zvqBx1MNgzF5
Join Samuel Kassow for a discussion of his translation of Rohkl Auerbach’s Warsaw Testament (White Goat Press).
Born in Lanowitz, a small village in rural Podolia, Rokhl Auerbach was a journalist, literary critic, memoirist, and a member of the Warsaw Yiddish literary community before the Holocaust. Upon the German invasion and occupation of Poland in 1939, she was tasked by historian and social activist Emanuel Ringelblum to run a soup kitchen for the starving inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto and later to join his top-secret ghetto archive, the Oyneg Shabes. One of only three surviving members of the archive project, Auerbach’s wartime and postwar writings became a crucial source of information for historians of both prewar Jewish Warsaw and the Warsaw Ghetto. After immigrating to Israel in 1950, she founded the witness testimony division at Yad Vashem and played a key role in the development of Holocaust remembrance. Her memoir Warsaw Testament, based on her wartime writings, paints a vivid portrait of the city’s prewar Yiddish literary and artistic community and of its destruction at the hands of the Nazis.
Samuel Kassow, Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University. He has been a visiting professor at many institutions and helped plan the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Among his various publications is Who Will Write Our History: Emanuel Ringelblum and the Secret Ghetto Archive (Indiana University Press, 2007).