Learning the Value of a Potato in the Holocaust

Sensing the dangerous sparks in the air, Miriam smuggled her family to Russia where they were forced to fend for themselves in a Siberian labor camp.

Hecht family

משפחת העכט (פירר) אחרי שהגיעו בשלום לניו יורק. משמאל נראים מרים וישרואל. יחיאל בשורהה העליונה, לצידה של מרים. באדיבות רו אורנים

We don’t know how old my grandfather was when he died in 2014.

He did not remember his birthdate and his birth certificate was destroyed along with everything else during the war. All he remembered was that it was warm out during his birthday celebrations as a child and that the celebrations always took place during the week when the Torah Portion of Bereshit would be read after the Jewish New Year. These memories seem to contradict – especially if you have ever examined the weather patterns in Poland.

Yechiel Hecht, my grandfather, was born to a religious Jewish family in Tsanz, Poland. His family moved to the town of Zagosh where his father, Yisroel Hecht-Firer, served as a well-respected community rabbi and worked as a Shochet, a ritual slaughterer. His wife Miriam was a strong, independent and intelligent woman who ran the home and worked alongside her husband as a Shochtke, a job not typically held by a woman, though she certainly did not let that affect her choices.

krakow
A street in Krakow before 1915, a postcard from the Folklore Research Center at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

In the early 1930s, with the rise of the Nazi party, Miriam felt a dangerous spark in the air. She felt instinctively unsettled by the extreme shifts in the political climate and could sense that it was only a matter of time before life would change forever in her hometown of Krakow.

Her intuitions proved undeniably correct when she was out in town running errands and faced a violent altercation with a Polish police officer. The officer shoved Miriam to the ground and shouted anti-Semitic slurs at her as she struggled to right herself.

That same day, Miriam decided her family was no longer safe in Poland and took it upon herself to remove them from the unknown dangers that lay ahead. She gathered every valuable she had in her possession and arranged for a truck to take her family from their home in Krakow over the Russian border to what she believed would be a safe location.  She begged her eight siblings who were also living in Europe to join her, to escape from the horrors that lay ahead but they refused, believing that it was just a passing phase that would fade into the pages of history.

Miriam, her husband, and five of their six children set out to start their new life in Russia. Leibish, their eldest son, was left behind to continue his religious studies in Yeshiva, a decision that ultimately led to his untimely death. When the Nazis invaded, the students were taken out to the courtyard, where they were shot. Leibish was among them.

The family made their way across the border, believing they had left their troubles behind – but trouble caught up with them when the war reached the Russian front. Over 200,000 Jews in Russia, Miriam, Yisroel and their children among them, were torn from their homes and sent to a Siberian work camp.  In this desolate, wintery wasteland, they were forced to fend for themselves. Hundreds of people found themselves living in the same building with nothing but a sheet to divide the spaces between families.

Yisroel was immediately singled out for suspicious activity as a practicing rabbi. He was separated from his family, imprisoned, and forced into a prison work crew where he was subjected to physical labor: chopping and collecting wood for the military.

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Miriam took the remaining valuables she had left after paying for passage to Russia and used them to barter with the local officials for wood to feed the fire in the stove in their building. That fire was the only thing that prevented the people living under that roof from freezing to death.

Yechiel, as the oldest remaining son, quickly became the man of the house.  With a mother and four siblings to protect and feed, he put his looks and talent for languages to work for him. Yechiel would wake up at the crack of dawn, put on what little warm clothing he had and hike for hours to a food distribution point where he would pose as a Russian citizen, standing in endless lines in the cold in the hopes of bringing home a hunk of dry bread to feed his starving family.

On the days when he actually managed to get a piece of bread, he faced a treacherous walk back to his building where he was forced to contend, not only with the freezing temperatures but also with muggers and vandals on the road who would accost him and steal his meager rations putting his hours of effort to waste. Beyond the stale bread, the family only ate what they could scrounge up from the fallow fields, usually a lone potato or forgotten onion that they would use to make a watery soup that could feed the crowd living in their shared space.

hechts
The Hecht (Firer) Family after their safe arrival in New York City. Miriam and Yisroel are on the left. Yechiel is in the top row standing next to Miriam. Courtesy of Ro Oranim

It was in this way that the Firer family survived the war – on instinct, with endless determination and resistance against those who had left them for dead. After the war, the family managed to reconnect with Yisroel and, after a few months in a displaced person camp where Yechiel and his brother were treated for exposure to Tuberculosis, with their papers proving their Polish citizenship, the Firer family was offered passage to either Palestine or America. Miriam was through with the idea of pioneering and the family chose to join her brother who had emigrated from Poland to New York City in 1920. When they arrived in America, grieving and broken from the horrors they had faced, the family changed their surname to Hecht, Yisroel’s mother’s maiden name, to avoid the associations the word Firer could bring up.

hechts
Yechiel Hecht and his new bride, Judith. Courtesy of Ro Oranim

The Hecht family reestablished themselves and built a new life in America. Yechiel got married, had five children, 26 grandchildren and an ever-growing number of great-grandchildren. He never forgot his experiences in the war and, until the day he died, he held a great appreciation for a basic piece of bread and a simple potato which graced his table at every meal so he could say a blessing on the very items that spared his life in the frozen tundra of Siberia.

This post was written as part of Gesher L’Europa, the NLI’s initiative to connect with Europe and make our collections available to diverse audiences in Europe and beyond.

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Braille Haggadot: The Exodus from Egypt at Your Fingertips

A look at Passover Haggadot written for the blind and the visually impaired

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A Braille Haggadah. Photograph: Hanan Cohen

The ancient Biblical command, “Tell your child,” led to the appearance of the “Haggadah,” the text which is traditionally read at the Passover Seder (“Haggadah” is derived from a Hebrew root word which means “to tell” or “to say”). The Haggadah, one of the most ancient and central texts in the Jewish culture, apparently first took shape in the Second Temple period, and its form has largely remained stable from the Middle Ages to the present day. While originally the command “to tell” was interpreted as an instruction to recite the Passover story out loud, in public, today no Seder is complete without a written Haggadah.

Haggadot in Braille

As such, it is no surprise that the blind and the visually impaired also have need for a Haggadah  and are unwilling to make do with reciting the texts aloud. The National Library of Israel is in possession of seven Passover Haggadot written in Braille. Six of these were printed in Israel in recent years by various institutions that provide services to the country’s blind citizens, while another was printed several decades ago in the United States.

A Braille Haggadah. Photograph: Hanan Cohen

This American text produced in the early 1950s and acquired recently by the National Library, is likely one of the first Braille Haggadot ever printed.

How is a Braille Haggadah Printed?

The Passover Haggadah is an essential ritual item in the Jewish year cycle and there is naturally  great demand for Braille copies of the text among visually impaired Jewish readers. Ms. Esti Maouda from the Central Library for the Blind, Visually Impaired and Handicapped located in the Israeli city of Netanya, shared some more details with us on this topic.

 

A Braille Haggadah. Photograph: Hanan Cohen

First, as one would expect, Braille Haggadot are printed without illustrations. Braille is designed to transcribe text and does not relate to any other kinds of graphic elements. Maouda confirms that the Netanya Library has been in possession of a number of Braille Haggadot since its founding, sixty years ago. The library has many subscribers who are either blind, visually impaired or have other disabilities. All of them are in need of Passover Haggadoh. Therefore, ten years ago, the institution mounted a campaign to print numerous Haggadot and send them to all its subscribers, eliminating the need to maintain a large inventory of Haggadot and of having to deal with the lending and return process. Today, the library in Netanya offers a print-on-demand service. A subscriber interested in obtaining a Haggadah in Braille can contact the library and a Haggadah is printed for them.

What kinds of Braille Haggadot can be found at the Library for the Blind? There are three different versions available. The most popular is a regular Haggadah featuring the standard text. In addition, one can find Haggadot which feature the classic text alongside commentaries. The third type, perhaps the most intriguing and poignant, is a Haggadah which includes songs and stories for children. This version is used by blind parents who wish to read to their children as well as by blind children who prefer to take an active part in the Seder ceremony around the table. All the Haggadot in the Netanya library are in Hebrew.

 

A Braille printer. Courtesy of the Central Library for the Blind, Visually Impaired and Handicapped in Netanya

A Braille Haggadah: A Perishable Book

As any collector or library with a collection of Haggadot will tell you, the Haggadah is a particularly perishable book:  signs of use are especially evident in an item used during the Seder, a culinary event that lasts for hours. Esti Maouda insists that a Braille Haggadah is no exception. It too absorbs wine stains, and food crumbs typically become stuck in between its pages. Therefore, every once in a while the Library for the Blind receives a request for a Haggadah from someone who is already in possession of a copy but whose Haggadah was either badly stained or torn. And, naturally, the same process of erosion that occurs with any Braille book is also evident in Braille Haggadot: the more a book is read, the more the raised Braille dots on the page become worn down, with the text then becoming more difficult to read.

Today, the use of Braille books is on the decline. New computer technology, which can convert onscreen text into Braille dots that a blind person can feel with their fingertips, has made the thick, heavy Braille book redundant. However, because of the ceremonial use of the Haggadah at the Seder, the demand for Braille Haggadot remains high and many blind celebrators of Passover continue to use these books to this day.

 

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Between Two Worlds: Feminist Yiddish Poetry in America

The fascinating life and works of one of the greatest female poets of the Yiddish literary world

Malka Heifetz Tussman

Yiddish poet Malka Heifetz Tussman seemed to have known a thing or two about lust – a subject she describes in her writings as being a part of God’s very nature. Malka also seems to have known a thing or two about the lives of those who were given an extra drop of that Godly passion.

In the beginning,
there was lust.

Out of lust, God
emerged in flames.

Lust
is God’s nature.

Everything God creates
is in God’s nature.

Whoever gets more
of God’s nature –

a teardrop more –
becomes an artist, a poet.

One more drop –
a murderer.

(In the Beginning)

Malka Heifetz Tussman was born in Wolyn in Ukraine in the late 19th century, though her exact year of birth is unknown. She was the second of eight children born to a Hassidic family of landowners and she spent her childhood on the farm run by her grandfather. Malka was a lively, rebellious girl with an affinity for nature who felt foreign in the world she grew up in.

At the age of eight, on her own initiative, Malka joined the nearby general Russian school, becoming the first Jewish child to attend it. It was at that tender age that she began to write poetry in her native Russian using the familiar letters of the Hebrew language. Several years later, due to the pogroms which targeted the region’s Jews, her family decided to emigrate to the United States. Her brother was the first to make the move, and, at the age of 16, Malka followed him across the Atlantic Ocean to start a new life.

Upon reaching America, Malka settled in Chicago and like many other young Jewish immigrants, she began to work as a seamstress and laborer. Though the family had been wealthy in Ukraine, they suffered from poverty during their early years in America.

Despite the material struggle and the hard work, Malka was fascinated by the new world and tried to adapt as fast as possible. She quickly learned English – both the spoken word and the language of English poetry.

“Edgar Allan Poe. I love the rhythm of his poems,” wrote Malka. “I walk on the sidewalk to the pace of his poems. I chew my breakfast to the pace of his poems. English begins to sing in my bones.”

Malka even began to write in English, but, within a short period of time, she went back to writing in Yiddish.

Yiddish poetry at the time was alive and vibrant. The authors hovered between two worlds – their native countries in Eastern Europe, and America, their new home. They also teetered between Torah observance and secularism, and between different social values – with feminism playing a major role in their work. The female poets of that generation were the first ones with the opportunity to build their lives beyond the traditional female roles. In addition to Heifetz Tussman, this wonderful group included leading artistic figures such as Celia Dropkin, Anna Margolin, Kadia Molodowsky (who would also eventually make it to the United States) and many others.

Despite the obvious quality of their writing, the female Yiddish poets often encountered derision regarding their works. Their writing was placed in a different category that set them aside as female poets – as writers of poetry which was intrinsically restricted and even slightly inferior.

Malka Heifetz Tussman, image from the "In geveb" website
Malka Heifetz Tussman, image from the “In geveb” website

Perhaps on purpose, Heifetz Tussman chose poetry structures that were considered inherently “male” and wrote poems on the “big” topics of the day which were also considered the domain of male poets. However, she also wrote extensively about women and about her own inner femininity. Her aspiration for freedom and expansion as a woman shines through in her writing, but its practical implementation was more complex, both in her private life and in how she defined herself as an artist.

Malka was 18 when she married Shlomo Tussman. The couple had two children. Tussman’s profession – a cantor – led the couple to frequently move from one community to another. Before they married, ever the free spirit, Malka set two conditions: firstly, that she would not be required to take part in Tussman’s religious and communal activities, and secondly – that she would have her own room wherever they lived.

Malka with Shlomo Tussman, photo: Ben Tzadok. the "In geveb" website
Malka with Shlomo Tussman, photo: Ben Tzadok, the “In geveb” website

Malka never stopped writing, but many years passed before she published her first book. She objected to the definition “female poet,” and unlike others Heifetz Tussman refused to allow her poems to be included in a 1928 anthology dedicated to female poetry. She saw the distinction between female poetry and “regular” poetry as illegitimate.

Malka was very open to the different trends, ideas, and styles of her period. She constantly aspired to learn, to expand and to choose; to place herself within the boundaries – and to break them. In her writing, she moves, experientially, between poems with an inflexible structure such as the sonnet and the triolet, and free-form writing, though even poems lacking any defined structure have somewhat structured content with most of Heifetz Tussman’s poems moving in a certain direction, toward release. She herself writes: “I am confined/within the form/I am short of breath/in my poems”.

In her early days in America, Heifetz Tussman had a definitively secular outlook. Later on, following the events of the Second World War, the Jewish world made more frequent appearances in her work. The main reason for her detachment was always her aversion to the institutionalism of the traditional world she grew up in, and not to the individual religious experience. Many of her poems are addressed to God, with longing:

With one sound of your many names,

You pierced yourself in me —

 and now you feed

 on my heart’s blood.

Malka Heifetz Tussman’s inner world is expressed in her poems. No clear distinction is made between globally significant events and those of her personal life. Heifetz Tussman left nothing out– she wrote of protest, her own spiritual search, and ordinary day-to-day events.

Her poems also lack any distinction between rational thought, emotions, and ethics. Perhaps such distinctions would contradict the very nature of Heifetz Tussman’s work, the power of which stems from her complete devotion to everything she writes about.

In a poem dedicated to Marcia Falk, Malka’s student and one of the translators of her poems into English, she wrote:

“Do not shy away from writing

about the small things

Large things give themselves over

in units to the small things.

The small things

spur on large things.”

Malka lived everything with the same passion and internalized it all, expressing it through her poetry. Above all, her poetry reveals her wonder for life itself: “Oy, what you can do with life in the hand”, She wrote in one of her poems.

Malka Heifetz Tussman’s deep wonder for life itself was expressed in her many poems about nature. Nature comes alive in her poems and is depicted as a conduit to enable a person to draw close to the riches of life. However, in her poetry, closeness to nature also accentuates the gap between humanity and nature. Nature has a certain wholeness and understanding and the questions people may ask are already clear and understood by nature.

Often I stroll in a nearby park;

old trees wildly overgrown,

bushes and flowers blooming all four seasons,

a creek babbling childishly over pebbles,

a small bridge with rough-hewn railings-

this is my little park…

Leaning on the railing

looking at myself in clear water,

I ask;

Little creek, will you tumble and flow here

forever?

The stream babbles back, laughing:

Today is forever.

Forever is right now.
(Excerpts from “Today is Forever”)

Life itself, with all its wholeness and bounty, also always contains pain – pain when it ends, pain when it’s flowing bounty halts. During the Second World War, in 1944, Malka Heifetz Tussman hoped to re-awaken the wonderment of her son who returned from the war. She described a green leaf, a red flower, a toy, and the smell of a homecooked meal. Further on in the poem, she shows him the wider world – towers, trains, bridges, and also talks to him about faith.

Over the years Malka Heifetz Tussman became a respected teacher and even worked in translation. She translated Yates and Auden, Christina Rossetti and Rabindranath Tagore into Yiddish, but from her own words it is clear that her initial admiration was reserved for Walt Whitman through whom, to a certain degree, she discovered America and experienced a new horizon of poetry.

Abraham Sutzkever, the famed Yiddish poet, said that the older Malka Heifetz Tussman got, the younger her poetry became.  “Everything she touched turned into poetry” he added.

Malka kept in touch with the Yiddish poets of the younger generation, teaching and guiding them. As one of her students, Kathryn Hellerstein explained, Malka Heifetz Tussman became a bridge between the generations – between those who emigrated from Eastern Europe and the young Jewish poets who took it upon themselves to make Yiddish poetry more widespread among readers with scant knowledge of Yiddish.

Heifetz Tussman moved to Israel following her husband’s death but returned to America a year later at her children’s request. She died on March 30th, 1987 in Berkley, California after publishing six books during her lifetime (the first was published when she was already over fifty). Malka had been working on her seventh book when she passed away. It was eventually published after her death.

English translations of the poems are taken from “With Teeth in the Earth: Selected Poems by Malka Heifetz Tussman,” translated, edited, and introduced by Marcia Falk (Browser Books Publishing, 1992).

This article originally appeared in Hebrew in the “HaMusach” online literary journal hosted on the National Library website.

 

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Meet the Oldest Printed Book in the National Library!

Printed in Rome, this book was once part of an Italian prince's library. Years later it made its way to Argentina, and eventually to Israel. The tome is now over 550 years old...

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The oldest printed book in the National Library collections, from 1469

The National Library of Israel collections include thousands of rare books from a plethora of countries, most of which were printed hundreds of years ago. About 300 of them were published during the Incunabulum period, the term used to denote the first 50 years of printing history, between 1450-1500. Printing was introduced to Europe around 1450 by Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz, Germany. One of the first books Gutenberg and his publishers printed was the Biblia Gutenberga, which contained both the Old and New Testaments in Latin. The book was well received thanks to the high quality print of the sacred text and the relatively large number of copies produced. Around 50 copies have survived to this day and they are considered extremely rare and valuable. A single page from one of the copies printed between 1450-1455 is preserved in the National Library of Israel.

Printing technology spread rapidly. First in Germany – by the year 1500 there were already some 300 printing presses up and running in different locations across the country. Other European nations soon followed suit: Printing began in Italy in 1464, a year later the Netherlands followed, while France received the new technology in 1469. In 1473, books began to be printed in Spain, and then in England in 1476. Often, the printing pioneers in these countries were German experts who had studied and operated presses in their homeland, and then immigrated to other parts of Europe to establish new printing houses.

The rapid expansion of printing houses across the known world led to the First Knowledge Revolution. Christian religious books were the most commonly printed literature in the early days of the printing press, but philosophical works and even popular literature found their way onto the presses as well.

European Jews also recognized the advantages of printing. By the 1470s production of Hebrew books in Italy and Spain had begun. In most cases, the editions were relatively limited in quantity. The first books, released in batches of only 200 to 300 copies, were quite expensive.

Among the incunabula preserved in the National Library of Israel is a copy containing several ancient philosophical texts, all originally composed in the second century CE. It contains essays by Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis, “Hermes Trismegistus” (there was no such author in truth, this was a later given name for an author or multiple authors active in the 2nd-century), and Albinus Platonicus.  Printed in the city of Rome by Konrad Sweynheim and Arnold Pannartz (a German pair who had immigrated to Italy) in 1469, this marked the first time that the philosophical texts were printed.

The printing of this book, as according to the colophon (the author or printer note that usually appears at the end of a book), was completed on February 28th, 1469. This precise, recorded date helped us to determine that this is the oldest printed book in the National Library of Israel’s collection.

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Lucii Apuleii Platonici Madaure[n]sis philosophi Metamorphoseos liber

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As was customary during this period, typesetters left room for the first initials of passages or chapters to be added in later. Book purchasers could then take the book to a professional illustrator to add colored letters, which often transformed the books into fascinating works of art. However, in our copy, these places remained empty. On the other hand, there were at least two owners of the book through the centuries who filled the tome with many handwritten footnotes.

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We can reconstruct some of the history of the book via the various seals and the ex-libris. For a certain period at the end of the 18th century, it was part of the library of Prince Marco Borghese of Italy. At the beginning of the 20th-century, it was owned by the collector Marcel Schlimovcz. For a period of time, it was kept in the Jewish community library in Argentina. The book was then donated to the National Library around 40 years ago.

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