On translation with context, Part II
Longstanding JPL community member Anna Fishman Gonshor recently sat down with us to talk about why her volunteer work in the Archives feels so important to her. Highlights from her August 4, 2025 interview have been divided into this and next month's blog posts, edited for length and clarity.
Yiddish typewritten letter with handwritten additions, regarding sending one tonne of paper to Rokhl Auerbach. Signed by ad-hoc committee members Rokhl H. Korn, Mashe Roskies and M, Ravitch. February 15, 1951. Courtesy of the JPL Archives, Ida Maze Fonds, ID: 1090-[18]-009/015-001.
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On the contributions of the JPL community
In many of the letters to Ida Maze, who was the central literary personality here, the sender will reference other Yiddish writers or cultural activists, so you get a bigger picture of what’s going on. One that really struck me was from Melech Ravitch to Ida Maze, in the early fifties I believe. Ravitch sends her a letter signed by Ravitch, Rokhl Korn and Masha Roskies which was sent out to a lot of people soliciting funds for one tonne of printing paper that was being sent to Rokhl Auerbach in Israel. Now. Why would anyone be sending a tonne of printing paper to Israel, and who is Rokhl Auerbach? Okay. As soon as I saw this, my hair stood up, all my emotional, intellectual antennae – I said ‘wow.’
Rokhl Auerbach letters sent from Israel to Rokhl Korn in Montreal, 1951-1966. Courtesy of the JPL Archives, Ida Maze Fonds, 1090-[18]-009/015-001.
Rokhl Auerbach was a sociologist, a writer, a psychologist, well known before the war. She was an intimate of [prominent Yiddish poet and playwright] Itzik Manger before the war. When the war broke out and the Warsaw Ghetto was established, Emanuel Ringelblum, the historian of the Warsaw Ghetto and the creator of the [secret, underground] Oyneg Shabbes Archives, said to Auerbach, you can’t leave, I need you here. And she stayed. And she became his right-hand person; an important figure in the Oyneg Shabbes Archive. She opened and ran the main soup kitchen in the ghetto. And the mission of the Oyneg Shabbes Archive was to document daily life in the ghetto; Ringleblum understood that history will be told by someone else if the Jews don’t tell their own. And so they recorded daily life in the ghetto by a variety of individuals, from the orthodox sector to Yiddish writers, to teenagers; whoever they could get to document their stories. So Rokhl Auerbach wrote extensively of her experiences in the ghetto, and she was one of the few people who knew where the archive was buried, and she survived the war. Ringleblum did not. She survived the war and was instrumental in recuperating that archive. Unfortunately, not all of it was found, but what they did find is being worked on to this day, to be made public eventually.
She published her own diary, several versions of it. Sam Kassow, the noted historian, recently translated it into English, and it’s published by the White Goat Press at the Yiddish Book Centre, under the title Warsaw Testament. It’s an incredibly important work, so I’m reading this letter and I’m saying to myself, oh my God, this is thanks to the library that Auerbach’s work was able to be published in Yiddish and came out to the world.
Warsaw Testament by Rokhl Auerbach, translated by Samuel Kassow. The English translation was published in July, 2024 by White Goat Press, and it won the National Jewish Book Award the same year.
Now, why did the Jewish Public Library have to send a tonne of paper? It was the early years of the State [of Israel], there was rationing no doubt. But more importantly, it was also a time when the battle to establish Hebrew as the language of the new Jewish state took the form of the oppression of other languages. So the Yiddish press was extremely hard hit, as was everything else associated with Yiddish. And so to enable Auerbach to publish her very, very significant work, the Jewish community of Montreal, the Yiddish speaking community of Montreal primarily, who at the time if you remember – the early fifties, survivors were just arriving – it was not a wealthy community that was supporting the library. The new library on Esplanade was being built, we had just arrived a few years before. We were not living in our own flat yet, we were boarders, the four of us in one room. My mother was out selling bricks to build the library at 10 cents a brick. So this is the community that built the library, that raised the money to send a tonne of printing paper so that Rokhl Auerbach’s monumentally important work could get published. It’s so important.
Sometimes I just want to go out on the street and yell, “Hey Jews, do you know what our community is? Do you know what our community has done? Do you know what exists in this community that we are capable of doing?” We’re capable of so much. You need to know this. You need to know what we are capable of doing.
Anna Fishman Gonshor has been a part of the JPL’s community for more than 70 years. She grew up attending the children’s library, and in the 1980s became Executive Director, then President. Most recently, she has been a consistent volunteer in our archives, working on translating the item level descriptions of many of our archival fonds from Yiddish to English.
