Erotic/Neurotic? - Jewish writing and identity

Judaism, Fall, 1999 by Joshua Sobol

When I heard about that ghetto theater I started to look for material. A survivor from the Vilna Ghetto asked me if I had read Kruk's Diary. I said no. "Then you must read it!" I got hold of the Diary, and the moment I opened it I couldn't put it away. Everything that happened in the ghetto, including the story of the theater, is described in Kruk's Diary with the greatest precision and the minutest detail. The Diary became my bedside book. I kept reading and rereading it. I tell you all this because for me Kruk's Diary became almost the epitome of what one can call Jewish writing. Let me try to explain.

Kruk was a cultural activist of the Bund in Poland between the two World Wars. Before the Second World he founded no less than 400 libraries and cultural centers of the Bund throughout Poland. He wrote stories for children, and he was a man of style. In his Diary, written in the Vilna Ghetto during the Nazi occupation, he apologizes for having abandoned his style "because" he says, "I have no time to deal with style." He was too concerned with recording precisely everything that was taking place in this ghetto, and he had no time or patience to bother about style.

I'm not one to judge the quality of Kruk's Yiddish in the Diary, but it feels like a very instrumental Yiddish, not a flourishing Yiddish, not a colorful one but a very precise one. I've rarely read a document written with such precision and with such an incisive look into reality. It is written with an unflinching courage in observing a horrible reality in real time, and not sentimentalizing it. Just to note down everything--like the opening of a brothel in the ghetto, or the orgies which took place in the Judenrat together with German officers. They are recorded with the dates and the names of the participants.

Reading that book revolutionalized my vision of the Holocaust. The diary suggests a vision of a society very busy with living and not preparing to die. All this happened to the 15 to 16 thousand Jews who were left after the mass massacres, the remnant of the almost 80,000 Jews who were the inhabitants of Vilna before the war. Kruk's Diary depicts the vitality, the energy, and the will to live that inhabited and inspired those 15 to 16 thousand Jews who lived in the ghetto.

When I first read the Diary I didn't have the slightest idea that I was going to write a play about the theater of the Ghetto. I was so overwhelmed by the Diary, by this kind of writing which I didn't encounter in any other culture. I read Hebrew, French, English, German, and Yiddish. I can hardly imagine a culture and a language other than the destroyed Yiddish one which could produce such a gaze on reality as Hermann Kruk offers you in his Diary. It compels you to change all your opinions and your prejudices about a reality that has been otherwise mythified. Reading Kruk was for me an act of demystification.

One day my students asked me what I was writing at the moment. I said I wasn't writing anything, but that I was reading about that theater in the Vilna Ghetto. Before I knew what I was doing, I found myself telling them the story of the theater of the ghetto. It went on for two hours, and they were sitting there looking at me with great amazement.