The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish - download pdf or read online

By Lisa Moses Leff

ISBN-10: 0199380953

ISBN-13: 9780199380954

Within the aftermath of the Holocaust, Jewish historian Zosa Szajkowski amassed up tens of millions of records from Nazi structures in Berlin, and later, public documents and personal synagogues in France, and moved all of them, illicitly, to big apple.

In The Archive Thief, Lisa Moses Leff reconstructs Szajkowski's tale in all its ambiguity. Born into poverty in Russian Poland, Szajkowski first made his identify in Paris as a communist journalist. within the past due Thirties, as he observed the threats to Jewish protection emerging in Europe, he broke with the social gathering and devoted himself to protecting his humans in a brand new approach, as a student linked to the YIVO Institute for Jewish examine.

Following a harrowing 1941 get away from France and U.S. military carrier, Szajkowski struggled to remake his existence as a historian, eking out a dwelling as a YIVO archivist in postwar manhattan. His scholarly output was once super however; he released ratings of stories on French Jewish historical past that spread out new methods of puzzling over Jewish emancipation, modernization, and the increase of contemporary antisemitism.

But underlying Szajkowski's scholarly accomplishments have been the files he stole, moved, and finally bought to American and Israeli study libraries, the place they continue to be this present day.

Part detective tale, half research of the development of background, The Archive Thief deals a window into the debates over the rightful possession of contested Jewish files and the strong ideological, monetary, and mental forces that experience made Jewish students care so deeply approximately maintaining the remnants in their previous.

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Additional info for The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust

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21 Szajkowski’s early writing in the Naye Prese was intended to appeal to fellow Jewish immigrants in that highly politicized milieu, much of it investigating the situation of Jewish workers and their organizing in France. Many of his articles focused on the trades themselves, ranging widely in scope—the garment trades, the furniture-makers, and the grocers, to choose just a few examples. These depicted a Jewish lower class with a somewhat different profile from the proletariat imagined by strict Marxists, since so many in the clothing trades worked at home, often subcontracting work to their spouses and other family members.

The lists were rich with information about each item, focusing not only on physical condition but also historical significance, often with reference to scholarly works produced in multiple languages. The more elaborate printed catalogues had beautiful illustrations on their covers as well, and they have become objects as revered by collectors as many of the rare books they described. In the “Jews in France” lists of 1961, Dollinger’s staff found several documents they knew must have come from their archives.

Back at the hotel, though, these papers from the archive of the city had become a Jewish archive. Selecting from the city’s collection only what had to do with Jews, the collector-historian had rearranged these papers for his own purposes. And he had not stopped with merely gathering these Jewish documents together. He had organized them into an archive, dividing them into the folders he had marked according to an idiosyncratic filing system only he understood. ” The act of “fixing” each object in place offers collectors “the most profound enchantment,” even a sense of omniscience, allowing them to peer through the objects deep into the worlds through which they have traveled.

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The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust by Lisa Moses Leff


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