Customer Reviews

Who Will Write Our History?: Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (The Helen and Martin Schwartz Lectures in Jewish Studies)

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This is an extremely important book which tells the story of Emanuel Ringelblum who saw the necessity to record life, and death, as he lived it during his "incarceration" in the Warsaw Ghetto. Mr. Ringelblum's efforts to collect, collate, and hide this important information, code name "Oneg Shabbat" are a major source of much of the information we currently have about those horrible years. I heartily recommend this book. Someone had to "write the history".

The story of the historian Emanuel Ringelblum who organized ordinary people to write what was happening from day to day in such a terrible situation, and then to hide the archives, is truly awe-inspiring. There have been previous comments about the first chapters, that concentrate on the history of 1930s Poland and the ideological battles between the advocates of Yiddish culture and the Polish-language "assimilationists" being tedious, however I found much of this material new and worthwhile and, although it may be a little too long, it is necessary for understanding what happened afterwards and how different groups within the Jewish community reacted. Much of what happened between the different Jewish political groups in 1930s Poland and in the Warsaw Ghetto had an impact on how Israel developed later.

A fantastic, I am tempted to say a definitive book about this compelling issue. For sure a milestone, as far as I can judge.

The intricacies of a long-dead, long-vanished world are recorded here to a deafening degree. The varieties of pre-war Jewish political movements, perhaps of passing interest to the specialist, are given pride of place, after which one is confronted by a barrage of pages on various ghetto figures who were either chronicled in the archives, or were contributed. Almost all of them died. The second half of the work is more readable than the first, but this says little. Only a very patient reader will be captured by this work - for specialists of the period, or for those who collect works on this horror, the Holocaust.

This has to be one of the most tedious books I have ever tried to read. It is crammed with minutia about prewar internecine politics of communist micro organizations no one but the author and his closest collegues can remember. It is salted with foreign words that are not even italicized, let alone defined. He does not even do us the courtesy of identifying the language, which might be Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, German, Lithuanian, Ukranian or Russian. There are probably not more than a dozen people on the planet who can benefit from this book, unfortunately one of the wrote a review that tempted me to buy it.