Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan

New York: Collier Books, 1973. Revised Edition, First Collier Books Edition. Trade paperback. Good. Maps by Morgan. 410, [2] pages. Footnotes. Maps. Cover has some wear and soiling. Some edge soiling. This was previously published under the title The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan. Chaim Aron was born in Gorodishche, Belorussia. He received a talmudical education at the yeshivah of Mir and later studied at the Government Pedagogical Institute in Vilna. In 1902 he settled in Warsaw, where he founded a pioneering elementary Hebrew school, of which he was principal for 40 years. The diarist has an eye for detail as well for major trends. He is concerned with politics as well as with philosophy. Since the diary was his constant companion, Kaplan poured into it a great deal of his intellectual life - his thoughts, his information, and all the conversations he had with his friends. He is not detached from the scene; indeed, he apparently sought out all possible first-hand information and his descriptions deal with the mood of the time, the hour of occurrence. Many seeming contradictions are really the hourly changes of those fantastic times, with the result that at times he condemns the leaders of the Jewish community and at times praises them. He had no use for Adam Czerniakow, the president of the Judenrat whom he accused of usurping power at a time when the Warsaw Jewish community was powerless to elect a leader. Yet when Czerniakow committed suicide because he could no longer bring himself to deliver Jews to the Nazis, Kaplan wrote a noble eulogy of him, commenting: His end proves that he worked and strove for the good of his people, though not everything done in his name was praiseworthy. Derived from a Kirkus review: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan, as edited here, covers the period from Germany's invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, to August 4, 1942. Then Kaplan, destitute and with few hopes left, awaited his turn to be "expelled," worried mainly now about the survival of the little stack of notebooks in which, in "clear and beautiful" Hebrew script "with no erasures," he had recorded the Jewish martyrdom. Kaplan, a distinguished teacher and Hebraicist, was born in White Russia, and one of the special virtues of his testimony is to be found in the fact that, although he had lived in Warsaw for 40 years, he identified neither with Poland nor with Polish Jewry. Thus, though his own fate is bound up with the tragedy all around him, he seems able to observe it with a degree of objectivity which makes his picture all the sharper and stronger. Dr. Katsh, who translated as well as edited the Diary, has done an excellent job of capturing the terrible spirit of the time and place in clear, tense, quiet prose. One could wish, however, that his account of the preservation and discovery of Kaplan's notebooks was more documented.