Samuel Kassow on Rokhl Auerbach's "Warsaw Testament"

• Samuel Kassow is interviewed by Sholem Beinfeld about Rokhl Auerbach and her book Warsaw Testament („וואַרשעווער צוואָות“), which Kassow translated into English. The interview was by Zoom on May 30, 2025, with Kassow and Beinfeld at their homes in Connecticut and Cambridge, MA, respectively.

• Samuel Kassow is the Charles H. Northam Professor, Emeritus, of History at Trinity College, and is recognized as one of the world’s leading scholars on the Holocaust and the Jews of Poland. Kassow was born in 1946 in a DP-camp in Stuttgart, Germany and grew up speaking Yiddish. Kassow attended the London School of Economics and Princeton University where he earned a PhD in 1976 with a study about students and professors in Tsarist Russia. He is widely known for his 2007 book Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Indiana University Press). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research, has won numerous awards, and has lectured widely.

• Sholem Beinfeld is co-editor-in-chief of the Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary and Professor of History, Emeritus, Washington University, St. Louis. He translated The Rudashevsky Diary, which was published as the November, 2024, issue of The Jewish Quarterly.

• Additional info on Warsaw Testament:

  • Publisher White Goat Press's page: https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/about/white-goat-press-0/rokhl-auerbach
  • Distributor page: https://www.ipgbook.com/warsaw-testament-products-9798988677390.php

• Music:

  • Hélène Engel: Yeder Ruft Mikh Zhamele from Voices Of The Ghetto (Voix Du Ghetto): Warszawa, 1943
  • Intro instrumental music: DEM HELFANDS TANTS from Jeff Warschauer: The Singing Waltz

Air Date: June 4, 2025