Zelig Kalmanovich

Zelig Hirsch Kalmanovich (Latvian: Zēligs Hiršs Kalmanovičs) (1885–1944) was a Litvak Jewish philologist, translator, historian, and community archivist of the early 20th century. He was a renowned scholar of Yiddish. In 1929 he settled in Vilnius where he became an early director of YIVO.

Zelig Hirsch Kalmanovich
Born1885
Kuldīga, Russian Empire
(modern-day Latvia)
Died1944
Vaivara concentration camp, Reichskommissariat Ostland
(modern-day Estonia)
OccupationPhilologist, translator, historian
Known forDiary of daily life in the Vilna ghetto

He was incarcerated in the Vilna Ghetto where he became an observant Jew. During his time in the ghetto, Kalmanovich kept a secret diary which is one of the few primary sources recording day-to-day life. His diary stressed the efforts of the community to retain their humanity in the face of oppression. For example, on October 11, 1942, he wrote the following entry in his diary:

On Simhat Torah eve at the invitation of the rabbi, I went for services in a house that had formerly been a synagogue and was now a music school ... I said a few words: 'Our song and dance are a form of worship. Our rejoicing is due to Him who decrees life and death. Here in the midst of this small congregation, in the poor and ruined synagogue, we are united with the whole house of Israel, not only with those who are here today ... And you in your rejoicing, atone for the sins of a generation that is perishing. I know that the Jewish people will live ... And every day the Holy One, blessed be He, in His mercy gives us a gift which we accept with joy and give thanks to His holy name.[1]

During the Nazi occupation, he was forced to work at the YIVO offices under Nazi supervision, sorting through the pillaged contents of Vilna's libraries and preparing selected volumes for shipment to Germany. He was sent to the Vaivara concentration camp in Estonia, where he died in 1944.

Works

Translations
  • Simon Dubnow. Algemeyne Idishe geshikhte: fun di eltste tsaytn biz der nayer tsayt. Vilnius: Historisher farlag, 1920. (Translation from German of Weltgeschichte des Jüdischen Volkes)
  • Jaroslav Hašek. Der braver soldat Shveyk in der velt-milkhome, vols. 1–2. Riga: Bikher far alemen, 1921, 1928. (Translation from Czech to Yiddish of Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války.)
  • Max Brod. Di froy fun undzer beynkshaft: roman. Riga: Bikher far alemen, 1928. (Translation from German to Yiddish of Die Frau, nach der man sich sehnt.)

Notes
  1. As quoted in: Stephen Howard Garrin, "'But I forsook not thy precepts'" (Ps. 119:87): Spiritual Resistance to the Holocaust," in Jonathan C. Friedman (Ed.), The Routledge History of the Holocaust (pp. 337-347). London: Routledge, 2011. p. 340.
gollark: This is why AMD was basically irrelevant for many years until Zen back in 2017 or so.
gollark: Each pair of "cores" shares a bunch of resources, so it isn't really as fast as an actual "core" in other designs, and I think their IPC was quite bad too, so the moderately high clocks didn't do very much except burn power.
gollark: See, while the FX-4100 is allegedly a fairly high-clocked quad-core, this is misleading. AMD's Bulldozer architecture used "clustered multithreading", instead of the "simultaneous multithreading" on modern architectures and also Intel's ones at the time.
gollark: (as this is based on a tower server and not a rack one, you might not even have ridiculously noisy fans in it!)
gollark: Anyway, I don't think this computer is worth £300, inasmuch as you could buy an old server with a Sandy Bridge era CPU for let's say £120, buy and install an equivalent GPU (if compatible, you might admittedly have some issues with power supply pinout) for £100 or so, possibly upgrade the RAM and disks for £50, and outperform that computer with £30 left over.

References
  • Dawidowicz, Lucy S. The War Against the Jews: 1933–1945. Bantam, 1986.
  • Kalmanovitch, Zelig. Yoman be-Getto Vilna u-Ketavim me-ha-Izavon she-Nimze’u ba-Harisot ("A Diary from the Ghetto in Nazi Vilna"). Tel Aviv, 1977.
  • Kassow, Samuel. Who Will Write Our History?: Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive. Indiana Univ. Press, 2007.
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