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PARTISAN REVIEW
psychology and perception. I would similarly suggest that Lucy went to Vilna
in order to find a Jewish destiny. Her motive was warm, not the chill one
made still colder in Roskies's prose.
"I had come to Vilna for its Jewish history," writes Dawidowicz, but she
recounts - and sometimes this has a comical effect - activities she pursued
which had little to do with the culture she was trying to understand. Certainly
it had little relation to the American films she saw in Vilna: Bette Davis in
Je7.ebel,
Greta Garbo in
Camille.
And there was little of the ultimate meaning
she sought in the routine she followed. Here is how she describes it:
I'd get up about eight, shiver through my cold-water wash, dress,
breakfast, and read the papers ... Then I'd walk to YIVO. I generally
did my own research in the morning or had some tutoring in Yiddish.
All this time Europe was exploding. There was the Czech crisis, then
came Munich, the
full
of the Spanish Republic, and then the Hitler-Stalin pact.
As Dawidowicz puts it:
... the present became more compelling than the past bringing new
dangers of war and intimations of disaster. It was as though we were
held in an ever-tightening vise from which we would never escape.
She did escape, one week before war was declared, but she understood
that the people she had lived among would not. Almost everyone of them,
including the Kalmanoviches, who took her in as one of their family, are
dead.
How are we tojudge this memoir? Certain Jewish writers of this cen–
tury have made extraordinary efforts to redefine the meaning they could
give to the fact that they were Jews, I might almost say to reinvent their
Jewishness. Martin Buber, born ofaJewish fumily in Germany and educated
in the very best German schools, did that thing unheard of among German
Jews of the middle class: he studied Yiddish and translated into German the
tales of the Hassidim. Gershom Scholem did something just as extraordinary:
he practically reinvented the Kabbala, and along with it the history of the
Jews. Lucy Dawidowicz did something comparable, though hardly as
memorable. In 1938 she went off on a tiny YIVO fellowship to the doomed
ghetto of Vilna - Mr. Roskies has the coarseness to call her so doing "bad
timing geopolitically." In my view her trip was perfectly timed to begin her
destiny, which as we all now know was to describe the destruction of the
East European Jews.
LIONEL ABEL
