Center for European Studies

L. Shneiderman and T. Elski were both Polish Jewish emigres living in Paris when the Civil War erupted in Spain and who covered the war for the world Yiddish press. Elski wrote for communist Yiddish publications and the reportage was assembled into a book Oyf di frontn fun Shpanye published in Paris after World War II. Shneiderman wrote for Warsaw’s Haynt, but his pieces were syndicated throughout the world Yiddish press as well as in leading Polish and Hebrew language publications and were reprinted in Poland on the even of World War II as Krig in Shpanyen. Although a strong subtext to Shneiderman’s book is the possibilities for Jewish immigration to a very liberal and welcoming Republican Spain, the narratives on Jewish volunteers have the somewhat negative tropic quality of Mendele’s  dos kleyne  mentshele, while those on Spaniards glorify their stoicism and resilience. By contrast, Elski’s writings  portray the Jewish volunteers to the International Brigades through the classic Soviet trope of the heroic monumental. In both books, the unlikely appearance of Yiddish is a subject of  surprise and amusement. In Shneiderman’s, it was his Yiddish literary credentials that may have saved his life when a communist who had interviewed him for a radio broadcast later vouched for his political reliability. In Elski’s case, Yiddish literature plays no role in the narrative. But Yiddish as a language does. And it does so most amusingly over a field telephone during  the chaos of battle when one Jew is cursing out another at the other end of the line with colorful and rather unique Polish Yiddish expletives.

Ostensibly war reportage, Elski’s and Shneiderman’s accounts of a Spanish tragedy, both have a subtext of another tragedy—the increasing infringement on Jewish rights of citizenship in their lands of birth and the search for new places of residence for a displaced people. In their war reportage, these writers living in exile, brilliantly twinned two tragedies, making the war upon an almost allyless  Republican Spain an analogue to the Jewish plight in interwar Europe.

Lunch will be provided.