Kagan was a renowned Jewish scholar, editor of Yiddish literature, and author of several books following his immigration to the United States from Italy in 1950. He first published the diary of his Holocaust survival in the original Yiddish in 1955. Readers now have access to an English version of this diary; Kagan\u2019s daughter donated the handwritten original to the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York after Kagan\u2019s death in 1993. It\u2019s a firsthand account, starting in 1943, of a survivor whose experience included one of the lesser-known aspects of the Holocaust: the fact that many Jewish people in Eastern Europe managed to evade the Gestapo by hiding in forest camps. To be sure, this diary covers much more than this topic, including the perilous situation of the \u201cRighteous Gentiles\u201d who hid the author and other Jews until they could do so no longer, as well as Kagan\u2019s tough decision to flee the Kovno Ghetto, which he regretted before learning the fate of those who\u2019d stayed behind. Still, it\u2019s Kagan\u2019s account of hiding in nature with his wife, sister-in-law, and others, evading predators both human and animal, that makes this work stand out: (\u201cThat first night we hardly shut our eyes. Animals of all sorts scream and growl.\u201d) Overall, this diary offers raw, firsthand recollections, conveying fear, despair, and hope\u2014as well as the later challenges of readjusting to freedom. It also honestly shows the ambivalence of the people who sheltered Kagan and others in a one-room cottage with few hiding places. Portions of the work can be very difficult to read, such as a recollection of sexual liaisons between a Jewish woman and her rescuers, which the author tentatively acknowledges may not have been consensual. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Kagan was a renowned Jewish scholar, editor of Yiddish literature, and author of several books following his immigration to the United States from Italy in 1950. He first published the diary of his Holocaust survival in the original Yiddish in 1955. Readers now have access to an English version of this diary; Kagan\u2019s daughter donated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":7086,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7085"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7085"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7085\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}