Melinda Rosenblatt Lecture | Rohkl Auerbach’s Warsaw Testament with Samuel Kassow

The annual Melinda Rosenblatt Lecture delivered by Samuel Kassow in conjunction with the publication of his translation of Rokhl Auerbach’s Warsaw Testament (White Goat Press). Auerbach was a journalist, literary critic, and one of only three surviving members of the Oyneg Shabes, historian Emanuel Ringelbum’s top-secret group of archivists in the Warsaw Ghetto. Upon immigrating to Israel in 1950 she founded the witness testimony division Yad Vashem and played a foundational role in the development of Holocaust memory. Warsaw Testament, a memoir based on her wartime writings both in the ghetto and on the Aryan side of the occupied city, provides an unmatched portrait of the last days of Warsaw’s Yiddish literary and cultural community and of Auerbach’s own struggle to survive.

Samuel Kassow is the Northam Professor of History at Trinity College and holds a PhD from Princeton University. He has been a visiting professor at many institutions and was on the team of scholars that planned the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Among his various publications is Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia (University of California Press, 1989) and Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Indiana University Press, 2007), which was translated into eight languages. Along with David Roskies he edited volume 9 of the Posen Anthology of Jewish Culture. Kassow was on the team of scholars chosen by Yad Vashem to write a one-volume history of the Holocaust in Poland. A child of Holocaust survivors, Professor Kassow spent his earliest years in a displaced-persons camp in Germany. His translation of Rokhl Auerbach’s Warsaw Testament (White Goat Press) will be released May 2024.