In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the Jewish historian Zosa
Szajkowski stole tens of thousands of archival documents related to
French Jewish history from public archives and collections in
France and moved them, illicitly, to New York. Why did this
respectable historian become a thief? And why did librarians in the
United States and Israel accept these materials from him, turning a
blind eye to the signs of ownership they bore? With her
award-winning book, The Archive Thief, Lisa Moses Leff reconstructs
Szajkowski's gripping story in all its ambiguity. Born into poverty
in Russian Poland in 1911, Szajkowski was a self-made man who
managed to make a life for himself as an intellectual, first as a
journalist in 1930s Paris, and then, after a harrowing escape to
New York in 1941, as a scholar. Although he never taught at a
university or even earned a PhD, Szajkowski became one of the
world's foremost experts on the history of the Jews in modern
France, publishing in Yiddish, English, and Hebrew. His work opened
up new ways of thinking about Jewish emancipation, economic and
social modernization, and the rise of modern anti-Semitism. But
beneath Szajkowski's scholarly accomplishments lay his shameful
secret: his pathbreaking articles were based upon documents that he
moved illicitly to New York. Eventually, he sold these documents,
piecemeal, to American and Israeli research libraries where they
still remain. Leff takes us into the backstage of the archives,
revealing the powerful ideological, economic, and psychological
forces that made Holocaust-era Jewish scholars care more deeply
than ever before about preserving the remnants of their past. As
Leff shows, it is only when we understand the issues at the heart
of his story, in all their ambiguity and complexity, that we can
begin to address the larger questions of the rightful ownership of
Jewish archives, as well as other contested archives, that are
still at issue today.
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