TSU AYKH SHVESTER UN BRIDER BAFRAYTE: NOKHMILHOMEH-PROBLEMEN FUN YIDISHN FOLK צו אייך שוועסטער און ברידער באפרייטע: נאָכמלחמה-פראָבלעמען פון יידישן פאָלק
Nyu-York [New York]: Zamoshtser Brentsh 375 Arbeter-Ring, 1945. Item #43346
1st edition of author’s first of seven published monographs, all on the Shoah. Original printed paper wrappers, small 8vo, 31 pages, 20 cm. In Yiddish. Title translates as, “To You, My Freed Brothers and Sisters: Postwar Problems of the Jewish People.”
Author's afterword:
“In 1939, the author published a book about the formation of a young Jew. The author then wrote his book on Orthodox concepts. During the six years of camp life, he grew older and changed. Along with all his works and writings, this work was also lost to him. His motto at the time, ‘Turn my back to Europe!’ confirmed the story with his bloodiest pen.
It is still quite a long way, even with the current treacherous number of Jews in Europe, to bring them all out in the best and only way for them: To the Land of Israel! With the ending of the exile, we will lose the last, psychologically and morally broken Jews. A seriously ill person is not taken a long way to a ‘Fulkom Heilanstalt,’ but is given first aid on the spot, right where he is lying!
And here is the cry for immediate, momentary help concerning the present brochure.
As with a seriously ill patient - it has no son to lead in political or religious discussions! And so it is for the rest of our nation, still in danger of going under as a nation, perhaps even more than in the past! [This brochure] is therefore an appeal first of all to all political parties about the over-political danger of moral and physical collapse; About the suicidal and self-deprecating mendation of weak, sick souls and the various evildoers, of all kinds.
Of course, it still lacks the concreteness, the planning. But it is only a shriek which cannot be evaluated according to all the rules of the art of singing...
Here it is shouted: from one who has not lost the last bit of fire and the last bit of patience! It is only to encourage, to remind and to make attention, in every way.
To all those who consider themselves to be Jewish organizations, this should be the call of the Ribs: come and strengthen the Jewish trembling knees! Keep them first at the Jewish consciousness and at their human height and later, my dear, later we will discuss.
Paris, June 1945.”
Mordechai Strigler (1918/21-1998) was a “prolific Polish-born Yiddish writer and editor of the Yiddish Forward….
He…obtained a rabbi diploma….From 1937 he worked as a moral preacher in the Warsaw Great Synagogue. After the Germans invaded Poland, he tried to return to his parents. However, he failed, was captured by the Germans and spent the following years in various forced ghettos and concentration camps.
From June 1943 he was then a prisoner in the Majdanek concentration camp. On July 28, 1943, he was transported from there to work camp C in Skarzysko-Kamienna by prisoner transport. It was an ammunition factory belonging to the HASAG Group, in which the prisoners without protective clothing were exposed to the picric acid used to fill underwater mines. This yellowing substance led to severe poisoning and reduced the life expectancy of the inmates to three months.
He wrote about his one-year stay there during his imprisonment, but these records were lost. He was released on 11 April 1945 in Buchenwald….
After the end of the World War, Strigler found a job with the Yiddish magazine Undzer Vort in Paris and settled there for the next seven years. The six-volume work Oisgebrente Likht (Extinguished Lights) was written here between 1948 and 1952 in which Strigler reports on his experience of the Shoah. Strigler had been in contact with the American-Jewish poet H. Leivick since 1945. He quickly recognized its literary potential. In 1952 Strigler emigrated to the United States and became editor of the Yiddish weekly Yidischer Kemfer in New York. He worked there until 1995 and wrote countless articles under 20 pseudonyms; between 1987 and 1998, the year of his death, he also worked for the then Yiddish daily newspaper Forverts.
In addition to his journalistic texts, Strigler also wrote poems, memoirs, political commentaries, and stories and novels. The focus of his fictional narrative texts was the life of Polish Jews before the Second World War. It was also important to him not only to depict the personal and collective experience of the camp stays during the Nazi regime in a literary way, but also to analyze it….
In 1978, Strigler received the Itzik Manger Prize for Yiddish Literature. In 1998 he was to be awarded an honorary doctorate in Hebrew literature from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. A few days before the award ceremony, however, Strigler died” (Wikipedia).
OCLC: 7413354. The University of Toronto keeps their copy in their Rare Book Collection
Light toning, Very Good Condition. Important work (holo2-163-19-XLGGAEO-IBB-’+).
Price: $200.00