Open Book Publishers
The Last Years of Polish Jewry: Volume 2: The Permanent Pogrom, 1935–37
- Yankev Leshchinsky (author)
- Robert Brym (translator)
- Eli Jany (translator)
- Robert Brym (editor)
Export Metadata
| Title | The Last Years of Polish Jewry |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | Volume 2: The Permanent Pogrom, 1935–37 |
| Contributor | Yankev Leshchinsky (author) |
| Robert Brym (translator) | |
| Eli Jany (translator) | |
| Robert Brym (editor) | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0342 |
| Landing page | https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/OBP.0342 |
| License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Yankev Leshchinsky |
| Publisher | Open Book Publishers |
| Publication place | Cambridge, UK |
| Published on | 2024-09-16 |
| Book set | This book is part of a 2-volume set. The other volume in the set is: |
| ISBN | 978-1-80064-997-2 (Paperback) |
| 978-1-80064-998-9 (Hardback) | |
| 978-1-80064-999-6 (PDF) | |
| 978-1-80511-003-3 (HTML) | |
| 978-1-80511-000-2 (EPUB) | |
| Short abstract | Ukrainian-born Yankev Leshchinsky (1876-1966) was the leading scholarly and journalistic analyst of Eastern European Jewish socioeconomic and political life from the 1920s to the 1950s. Known as “the dean of Jewish sociologists” and “the father of Jewish demography,” Leshchinsky published a series of insightful and moving essays in Yiddish on Polish Jewry between 1927 and 1937. Despite heightened interest in interwar Jewish communities in Poland in recent years, these essays (like most of Leshchinsky’s works) have never been translated into English. |
| Long abstract | Ukrainian-born Yankev Leshchinsky (1876-1966) was the leading scholarly and journalistic analyst of Eastern European Jewish socioeconomic and political life from the 1920s to the 1950s. Known as “the dean of Jewish sociologists” and “the father of Jewish demography,” Leshchinsky published a series of insightful and moving essays in Yiddish on Polish Jewry between 1927 and 1937. Despite heightened interest in interwar Jewish communities in Poland in recent years, these essays (like most of Leshchinsky’s works) have never been translated into English. The Last Years of Polish Jewry helps to rectify this situation by translating some of Leshchinsky’s key essays. A thoughtful Introduction by Robert Brym provides the context of the author’s life and work. The essays in this volume, based on years of research and first-hand observation, focus on the period 1935-37. The rise of militant Polish nationalism and the ensuing anti-Jewish boycotts and pogroms; the increasing exclusion of Jews from government employment and the universities; the destitution, hunger, suicide, and efforts to emigrate that characterized Jewish life; the psychological toll taken by mass uncertainty and hopelessness—all this falls within the author’s ambit. Few works in English have the range and depth of Leshchinsky’s essays on the last years of the three million Polish Jews who were to perish at the hand of the Nazi regime. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of Eastern European history and society, especially those with an interest in Eastern Europe’s Jewish communities on the brink of the Holocaust. |
| Print length | 190 pages (viii+182) |
| Language | English (Translated_into) |
| Yiddish (Original) | |
| Dimensions | 156 x 11 x 234 mm | 6.14" x 0.43" x 9.21" (Paperback) |
| 156 x 13 x 234 mm | 6.14" x 0.51" x 9.21" (Hardback) | |
| Weight | 279g | 9.84oz (Paperback) |
| 447g | 15.77oz (Hardback) | |
| Media | 8 illustrations |
| OCLC Number | 1374819612 |
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Contents
Introduction
(pp. 1–10)- Robert Brym
1. The pogroms in Poland, 1935–37
(pp. 15–74)- Yankev Leshchinsky
- Robert Brym
- Eli Jany
2. Pogrom gunpowder
(pp. 75–82)- Yankev Leshchinsky
- Eli Jany
- Robert Brym
3. The Minsk-Mazovyetsk pogrom
(pp. 83–88)- Yankev Leshchinsky
- Robert Brym
- Eli Jany
4. The Pshitik pogrom
(pp. 89–106)- Yankev Leshchinsky
- Robert Brym
- Eli Jany
5. Government antisemitism
(pp. 109–114)- Yankev Leshchinsky
- Robert Brym
- Eli Jany
6. The first ghetto bench in the universities
(pp. 115–120)- Yankev Leshchinsky
- Robert Brym
- Eli Jany
7. Ghetto benches
(pp. 121–124)- Yankev Leshchinsky
- Robert Brym
- Eli Jany
8. Jewish self-defence
(pp. 127–132)- Yankev Leshchinsky
- Robert Brym
- Eli Jany
9. Protests against pogroms
(pp. 133–146)- Yankev Leshchinsky
- Robert Brym
- Eli Jany
10. Old-fashioned methods in new times
(pp. 147–152)- Yankev Leshchinsky
- Robert Brym
- Eli Jany
11. Suicides
(pp. 153–158)- Yankev Leshchinsky
- Robert Brym
- Eli Jany
12. Is emigration a solution?
(pp. 159–164)- Yankev Leshchinsky
- Robert Brym
- Eli Jany
13. Jews flee Poland
(pp. 165–172)- Yankev Leshchinsky
- Robert Brym
- Eli Jany
Contributors
Yankev Leshchinsky
(author)Robert Brym
(translator)SD Clark Professor of Sociology Emeritus and an Associate of the Centre for Jewish Studies at University of Toronto
Robert Brym, FRSC, is SD Clark Professor of Sociology Emeritus and an Associate of the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. His latest works include Robert Brym and Randal Schnoor, eds, The Ever-Dying People? Canada’s Jews in Comparative Perspective (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023) and “Jews and Israel 2024: Canadian Attitudes, Jewish Perceptions,” Canadian Jewish Studies/Études Juives Canadiennes (38: 2024), 6–89. For downloads of Brym’s published work, visit https://utoronto.academia.edu/RobertBrym
Eli Jany
(translator)PhD student in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Centre for Jewish Studies at University of Toronto
Eli Jany is a PhD student in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. He has translated poems by Sarah Reisen (In geveb, 12 May 2020, https://ingeveb.org/texts-and-translations/three-poems-reisen) and, with Robert Brym, co-translated volume 1 of The Last Years of Polish Jewry and “Jewish Economic Life in Yiddish Literature: Yitskhok Ber Levinzon and Yisroel Aksenfeld,” East European Jewish Affairs (53, 1: 2024), both by Yankev Leshchinsky.
Robert Brym
(editor)SD Clark Professor of Sociology Emeritus and an Associate of the Centre for Jewish Studies at University of Toronto
Robert Brym, FRSC, is SD Clark Professor of Sociology Emeritus and an Associate of the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. His latest works include Robert Brym and Randal Schnoor, eds, The Ever-Dying People? Canada’s Jews in Comparative Perspective (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023) and “Jews and Israel 2024: Canadian Attitudes, Jewish Perceptions,” Canadian Jewish Studies/Études Juives Canadiennes (38: 2024), 6–89. For downloads of Brym’s published work, visit https://utoronto.academia.edu/RobertBrym
References
- Aleksiun, Natalia, Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2021).
- Anti-Defamation League, “Poland,” 2023, https://global100.adl.org/country/poland/2023
- Aronson, I. Michael, Troubled Waters: The Origins of the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia (Pittsburgh PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990).
- Avrutin, Eugene M., and Elissa Bemporad, eds, Pogroms: A Documentary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).
- Avrutin, Eugene M., and Elissa Bemporad, “Pogroms: An Introduction,” pp. 1–22, in Eugene M. Avrutin and Elissa Bemporad, eds, Pogroms: A Documentary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).
- Bacon, Gershon, “Cautious Use of the Term “Antisemitism”—For Lack of an Alternative: Interwar Poland as a Test Case,” pp. 187–206, in Scott Ury and Guy Miron, eds, Antisemitism and the Politics of History (Waltham MA: Brandeis University Press, 2024 [2020]).
- Cichopek-Gajraj, Anna, and Glenn Dynner, “Pogroms in Modern Poland, 1918–1946,” pp. 193–99, in Eugene M. Avrutin and Elissa Bemporad, eds, Pogroms: A Documentary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).
- Leshchinsky, Yankev, Erev khurbn: Fun yidishe lebn in poyln, 1935–37 [On the Eve of Destruction: On Jewish Life in Poland, 1935–37] (Buenos Aires: Tsentral-farband fun poylishe yidn in argentina, 1951).
- Melzer, Emanuel, No Way Out: The Politics of Polish Jewry, 1935–1939 (Cincinnati OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 1997).
- Mendelsohn, Ezra, “Interwar Poland: Good for the Jews or Bad for the Jews?”, pp. 130–39, in Chimen Abramsky, Maciej Jachimczyk, and Antony Polonsky, eds, The Jews in Poland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).
- Penkalla, Adam, “The Przytyk Incidents of 9 March 1936 from Archival Documents,” Polin, 5 (2008), 327–59.
- Piłatowicz, Józef, “Anti-Semitic Resentments at the Universities in the Second Polish Republic on the Example of Lviv (1918–1939 AD),” Cogent Arts and Humanities, 7:1 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2020.1801369
- Polonsky, Antony, The Jews of Poland and Russia: A Short History (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2013).
- Polonsky, Antony, “The Bund in Polish Political Life, 1935–1939,” pp. 166–97, in Ezra Mendelsohn, ed., Essential Papers on Jews and the Left (New York: New York University Press, 1997).
- Rabinowicz, H., “The Battle of the Ghetto Benches,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, 55:2 (1964), 151–59.
- Tomaszewski, Jerzy, “Some Methodological Problems of the Study of Jewish History in Poland between the Two World Wars,” pp. 251–63, in Antony Polonsky, ed., From Shtetl to Socialism: Studies from Polin (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1993).
- Veidlinger, Jeffrey, “Anti-Jewish Violence in the Russian Civil War,” pp. 133–38, in Eugene M. Avrutin and Elissa Bemporad, eds, Pogroms: A Documentary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).