The annual Melinda Rosenblatt Lecture will be delivered by Samuel Kassow in conjunction with the publication of his translation of Rohkl 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.
