by Lawrence Bush on September 1, 2010
Viktor Frankl, who chronicled the preservation of his mental health as a concentration camp inmate in Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), died on this date in Vienna in 1997. Dr. Frankl headed the “suicide pavilion” of the General Hospital in Vienna from 1933 to 1937, where he treated thousands of suicidal women, and hung on under the Nazis as a neurologist and brain surgeon at the Rothschild Hospital in Vienna until 1942, when he, his wife Tilly, and his parents were deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Working with Rabbi Leo Baeck and Regina Jonas, he saved hundreds of his fellow prisoners from despondency and suicide and gave lectures on mental health. In 1944 he endured life as a slave laborer in Auschwitz and Dachau while losing his wife to the executioners at Bergen-Belsen. Clinging to her memory, he later wrote, he “grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.” Frankl survived to become an important humanistic psychotherapist who wrote some thirty-two more books.
“Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” —Viktor Frankl
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by Lawrence Bush on August 31, 2010
Nazi Germany invaded Poland on this date in 1939, triggering World War II and setting in motion the genocide of Europe’s Jews. Close to two thirds of Poland’s 3.5 million Jews would fall into Nazi hands, while a third came under the rule (and relative protection) of the Soviet Red Army, which invaded Poland from the east on September 17. Hundreds of concentration camps would be built in Poland by the Nazis, and alongside Poland’s three million Jews, close to three million Polish gentiles would be killed in the course of the war. An additional million or more Polish citizens would be deported by the USSR, many to forced labor camps in Siberia.
“Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages . . .” —W.H. Auden, “September 1, 1939”
by Lawrence Bush on August 30, 2010
Emily Ladenburg, an intrepid horsewoman and a regular in the New York Times society columns, introduced ankle-length split skirts (culottes) for horseback riding in Saratoga Springs on this date in 1902. She was the widow of a millionaire banker, Adolph Ladenburg, who drowned at sea in 1896. While the split skirt had been worn by Annie Oakley and other celebrated women of the West, Ladenburg introduced it to wealthy circles in the East and helped end the status quo of side-saddle riding for women. The side-saddle style, de rigueur for Victorian women, was rooted in male obsession with women’s virginity and reinforced myths about women’s frailty and helplessness (though several technological innovations eventually enabled side-saddle riders to perform amazing feats). In the 1900s, riding astride became a symbol of women’s liberation, and several suffragist parades/demonstrations were led by women on horseback, riding astride.
“If the world were a logical place, men would ride side-saddle.”—Rita Mae Brown
by Lawrence Bush on August 29, 2010
The week-long Czernowitz Yiddish Language Conference began on this date in 1908. The gathering was organized chiefly by Nathan Birnbaum (1864-1937), a Viennese writer and intellectual who had coined the terms “Zionism” and “Yiddishism.” Many important Yiddish writers of the day attended, with the unfortunate exceptions of Sholem Aleichem, who was seriously ill, and the elderly Mendele Moykher Sforim. The minutes of the Conference went unpublished, and efforts to establish an office and membership organization devoted to follow-up were unsuccessful. Nevertheless, writes Ruth Kaswan, the Conference “was a landmark occasion in the rise of Jewish consciousness and liberation.” Its affirmation of Yiddish as a language was “a declaration of solidarity with the Jewish masses that was by definition a revolutionary act.” This “inspired the creation of a vast school system around which the Jewish population in the areas of its greatest concentration, in Poland and the Baltic States, was able to create almost a state within a state in the period between the two world wars, inspiring in the people a sense of pride and identity and providing a focal point for democratic socialist action in the context of the political activities of their countries.” (For an in-depth conversation about the Czernowitz Conference with Dr. Emanuel Goldsmith, visit http://jewishcurrents.org/2008_june_lang.htm/.)
“The great achievement of the Conference was not that it put Yiddish on the map — Yiddish had been on the map for a long time — but it put Yiddishism on the map. Yiddishism is the idea that preserving, sustaining, developing and encouraging culture in the Yiddish language is a form of Jewish living, a way of being Jewish.” —Emanuel Goldsmith
