Sample Sources
The sources below are those contained in our three curated collections—covering themes of Passover, Gender Roles, and Holocaust Resistance. They represent a fraction of the thousands of sources that will be available when the full site launches in 2024.
A Load of Shoes
The cartwheels rush,
quivering.
What is their burden?
Shoes, shivering.
The cart is like
a great hall:
the shoes crushed together
as though at a ball.
A wedding? A party?
Have I gone blind?
Who…
The Third Reich and the Jews
Without the appropriate distance, writing history is particularly difficult and thorny in this case. And there is an additional element of complexity. Forced into the thankless role of the prosecutor…
Applause for Anne Frank
The Satisfied One:I am gratified by the success in Vienna of The Diary of Anne Frank. It is a harrowing play. And it…
The Chatham House Version
This appraisal of the west has remained Toynbee’s considered judgment. “In my eyes,” he states in the last volume of A Study of History, published in 1961, “the west is a…
Family Conflicts
My childhood, if we’re speaking of relations at home, was exceptionally easy; I never felt a need to rebel against my parents’ conservatism. I encountered no gates to break through—they were all…
Of Bombs and Mice: A Novel of Wartime Warsaw
Some two years ago Nata had been deported from Warsaw to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Now she was free, but still unable to come to grips with life, so newly regained, though in the first breath…
A Story about a Name
Older people still remember it. Younger people know about it from reading our classic writers of the older generation: how Jews once gave much thought to naming a child, long before it was born and…
God Hid His Face
All roads led to death,
Every road.
All winds breathed betrayal,
Every wind.
In every doorway, vicious dogs barked,
In all the doorways.
All the waters laughed at us,
All the waters.
Every night grew…
Jewish Writings
During the period between the two wars, the relations between Jews and Muslims progressively altered. One can assign several causes to this unfortunate evolution.
One is the acceleration…
A Kol Nidre Service at the Gȩsia Street Cemetery
I was then in Warsaw for the second time. That city had always exerted a powerful attraction for me, with its great and all-encompassing Jewish life. When I was in the Polish capital for the first…
Tales of Kleinville
Open a map, stretch out your index finger, run it along the winding contours of the Plata River, and you will come to a small black dot that does and does not seem like the…
The Old Notebook
The filthy train lurched along the tracks, jolting my spine through the slats of the wooden seat.
I was thoughtful, my happiness mixed with vague regrets. Happiness? No, a deserter’s sense of hard-won…