WRITERS' CHOICE
LESLIE EPSTEIN: For two years
now I have been reading about the
destruction of European Jews.
It
has been, of course, a heart–
stopping experence; what it has
done to me - already I note with
dismay how ridiculously moved I
become at the least kindly act
(such a thing sometimes happened)
by a Rumanian, a Ukrainian, a
Pole - I won't know for many
years more. The first-person ac–
counts are always the best. They
cease being worthwhile only when
- rarely - they stop telling, or
start embroidering, the truth. The
diaries, the records kept on the
spot, buried in oil cans, smuggled
outside, are the steadiest and least
hysterical of modern history
books. Some (Ringelblum, Kap–
lan, Anne Frank) are well known.
Here are three others, books by or
about children:
Young Moshe 's
Dairy,
by the solemn-faced Moshe
Flinker, his eyes lost behind the
wire-framed spectacles of some
grown-up person;
The Dairy of
the Vilna Ghetto,
by Yi tzhak
Rudashevski, whose two passions,
if I remember correctly, were the
Red Army and his
gimna zye
teacher, Gershteyn, who in the
course of things died ("How beau–
tifully, with what youthfulness he
used to go up the school steps,
carrying his rubbers in his hands
and his cane!"); and
The Diary of
Adam's Father,
written over a
single summer by Aryeh Klonicki,
hidden in a wheat field - Adam
himself, a few months old, was in a
farmhouse nearby; he survived his
father by a year or so, and then
seems to have been abandoned by
the same Polish couple who, after
the war, in order to obtain Care
packages from Klonicki's brother,
kept hinting, hinting, hinting
that the boy was yet alive.
These three diaries were all
printed, a little clumsily, in Israel,
by small publishers (Ghetto
Fighters House is the name of
one). The best place
to
read them
is in the YIVO library, up on the
second floor. There are old chan–
deliers there, with crystal drops
bigger than the hidden light–
bulbs . The books come up a
dumbwaiter inside of a lady's
purse. The windows overlook 86th
Street and Central Park. Keep
your coat on, it's chilly. And -
this is a
J ewish
library - noisy,
too. Dina Abramowicz, the libra–
rian, elderly now, and about four
and a half feet tall, talks in a nor–
mal tone of voice . But what con–
versations! "Tell me, Mister Eps–
tein," she says, pointing to a
hump-backed peddler on the cover
of a new children's book, " in your
opinIOn is this a Jewish
stereotype?"
"Absolutely! " This from a
