Herman Kruk was a man of 42 and the director of the Yiddishist Grosser Library at the Cultural League in Warsaw when war broke out and he, along with other Jewish men who were in danger of being snatched off the streets, fled the city. After a month of wandering, hiding and failing to escape to the East, he arrived in Vilna, then under Lithuanian control, along with twenty thousand other Jewish refugees from Poland. Vilna already had a Jewish population of sixty thousand, with a thriving modern secular culture. The Yivo, a research institute in the Jewish humanities and social sciences, an academy of language and centre of cultural policy whose governing board included Sigmund Freud, had been founded there in 1925. It moved to New York during the war, and was responsible for compiling, editing and translating Kruk's diaries into Yiddish.

LRB 22 May 2003 | PDF Download