Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 5.153 October 26, 1995 1) Asch's God of Vengeance (Dan Leeson) 2) Asch's God of Vengeance (Ethel R. Magal) 3) Lucjan Dobroszycki (Dan Leeson) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 25 Oct 1995 19:18:00 EDT From: leeson@aspen.fhda.edu Subject: Comments on my remembrance of Asch's God of Vengeance I am very grateful for the correction to my understanding of the plot of Asch's God of Vengeance. And you are correct to describe the details more accurately than my memory tolerated. I read the play around 1952 and have not thought much of it since so that fact that I remembered anything at all was amazing. I got into a big Asch kick at that time, what with Tales of My People, and his Asch's biblical books. But I wanted more. I wanted to read his early works and that is how I stumbled on the play God of Vengeance. Frankly, it made my hair stand on end. I had never read such an erotic (and at the same time anti-erotic) piece as this. That which appeared on Broadway at the time occasionally made a veiled refence to sex. And here was Asch dealing with the subject of prostitution. But I got it mixed up over the years and I am so grateful that you straightened me out. It is time I read the play again. Dan Leeson Los Altos, California 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 26 Oct 1995 7:36:47 -0200 (B) From: ets@aleph.tau.ac.il Subject: God of Vengeance - Oops! Dan, you're right and I was wrong. The father, enraged that his plans have gone astray does take his daugher downstairs to the brothel. End of play. Whether she actually begins to work or not, is unresolved. Again my apologies. Ethel R. Magal Tel Aviv, Israel 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 26 Oct 1995 08:42:45 EDT From: leeson@aspen.fhda.edu Subject: Obituary for Dr. Lucjan Dobroszycki The following obituary appeared to the NY Times of Oct. 26, 1995 (west coast edition). It adds to the warm remarks made in a posting to Mendele on Oct. 25 following the death of Lucjan Dobroszycki on Tuesday in New York. I post this for those who might not have access to the extended and formal obituary as found in the NY Times. Dr. Lucjan Dobroszycki, 70; Wrote of Doomed Polish Jews By David Margolick Dr. Lucjan Dobroszycki, who endured and then chronicled the life of Poland's doomed Jewish community before, during and after the Holocaust, died on Tuesday at Mount Sinai Medical Center. He was 70 and lived in Manhattan. The cause was cancer, according to the hospital. As the longtime senior research associate at the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research in Manhattan and the Eli and Diana Zborowski Professor of Inter disciplinary Holocaust Studies at Yeshiva University, Dr. Dobroszycki was known as an expert on the history of the Jewish community in Poland. Dr. Dobroszycki depicted the life of Poland's Jews in "Image Before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Life in Poland 1864-1939" (Schocken Books, 1977), which he wrote with Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett. Later, he edited the first English translation of "The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto" (Yale University Press, 1984). The materials were assembled by a team of ghetto residents working clandestinely, who recorded the grim fate of the Jews in Dr. Dobroszycki's native city of Lodz. It was a project that Dr. Dobroszycki, who spent four years in the ghetto, began in Poland in the 1960's. Only two of five projected volumes were published there before a campaign of government-sanctioned anti-Semitism scuttled the endeavor; the remaining volumes have never been published there. The wave of anti-Jewish agitation prompted Dr. Dobroszycki and his family to move to New York in 1970. Before his departure, he had collaborated on several other projects, on subjects like the Warsaw Uprising, the Polish underground press and the diaries of Hans Frank, the governor-general of Nazi-occupied Poland. His doctoral thesis on the collaborationist press during the Nazi occupation, also fell victim to the anti-Jewish campaign but was smuggled out of the country and published in German. That book, "Reptile Journalism": The Official Polish Language Press Under the Nazis 1939-45," was translated into English and published by Yale University Press last year. At the time of his death, Dr. Dobroszycki was completing work on a study of the futile effort after World War II to reconstitute a Polish Jewish community out of the people who had survived or been spared Auschwitz, Treblinka and Chelmno. A portion of that work, "Survivors of the Holocaust in Poland: A Portrait Based on Jewish Communal Records 1944-47," was published last year by M. E. Sharpe. The Germans marched in Lodz on Sept. 8, 1939, and quickly created a ghetto in which Dr. Dobroszycki and his family, along with 160,000 other Jews, were trapped. He remained there until the final liquidation in August 1944, when he and his family were deported to Auschwitz. Dr. Dobroszycki's parents and two youngest brothers were killed there; he survived at a satellite camp. He was liberated in May 1945 in Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia, and after prolonged treatment for tuberculosis returned to Lodz, where he enrolled in the university. He earned his master's and doctoral degrees at the University of Leningrad, then began a long association with the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Dr. Dobroszycki was renowned for his insistence that the Holocaust and those who died in it not be cheapened by shoddy scholarship, partisanship, sensationalism or sentimentality. That was the approach he took in editing "The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto." Though he knew none of the writers personally, he said he continuously felt their presence. "Always, always, they were looking over my shoulder," he once said. Dr. Dobroszycki is survived by his wife, Felicja, and their daughter Joanna, both of Manhattan. He is to be buried in Jerusalem. Dan Leeson Los Altos, California ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 5.153