Two main factors determined the use of Yiddish as a language for historical writing: a significant readership and Yiddishist enthusiasts’ zeal to prove that the language was well equipped for such things. At the same time, the linguistic barrier led to marginalization and neglect of this valuable corpus of material. Mark Smith does a commendable job trying to bring the ‘hidden’ historical research into the mainstream.
~Gennady Estraikh
This well-researched and original book makes a major contribution to our understanding of postwar Yiddish language historical scholarship on the Holocaust. Contrary to a widely held belief, Mark Smith shows that serious historical investigation of the Holocaust began right after the war, not decades later. This book reveals the extent to which postwar Yiddish cultural creativity embraced not only poetry and fiction but also serious scholarly research.
~Samuel D. Kassow
An immense scholarly contribution in themselves and are an indispensable resource for scholars working on the Holocaust, particularly those unable to read Yiddish. Taken as a whole, the book makes a
remarkable contribution to the project of recovering the Yiddish historians’ works and beginning to recognize their far-reaching legacy.
~Shirli Gilbert
Mark L. Smith has done a tremendous service to our understanding of the Holocaust in general and, more specifically, how Jews responded to their experiences during the Holocaust. This book is well-written and the biographies of the historians, as well as each one’s bibliography, is tremendously helpful in and of itself.
~Nick Underwood
The Yiddish Historians and the Struggle for a Jewish History of the Holocaustis possibly the most important contribution to the historiography of the Holocaust published in a number of years. The Yiddish historians of the Shoah, the first to attempt an objective approach to the Catastrophe, found their own preeminent historian. Smith’s book is an outstanding achievement.
~Saul Friedländer
It has expanded the historiographical field of vision. In pursuit of a full understanding of Jewish life within the Nazi orbit, especially in eastern Europe, scholars cannot now help, thanks to Smith’s masterly exposition, but seriously take into account the works of the Yiddish historians.
~Gabriel N. Finder
With a keen sense of historical purpose, painstaking scholarship, and a commitment to unlocking the silenced voices of the past, Mark Smith's The Yiddish Historians and the Struggle for a Jewish History of the Holocaust restores a critical chapter to twentieth-century Jewish historiography. The contributions of pioneering survivor historians Phillip Friedman, Isaiah Trunk, Mark Dworzecki, Nachman Blumental, and Joseph Kermish—all of whom wrote in Yiddish to assure the Jewish perspective on the Holocaust—can finally now be heard. Continuity, not rupture, defined their work, a heretofore missing chapter in the chain of East European Jewish historical writing from the late nineteenth century, through the interwar years, and during the terrors of the war itself. Smith's comprehensive bibliographies make The Yiddish Historians an unparalleled resource for any scholar working on modern Jewish historiography and consciousness.
~Nancy Sinkoff, Author of Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands
