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HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

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Reviews 229sheltered them in his network of Studite monasteries and convents. This memoir,written while Rabbi Kahane was in hiding, is an important source for this horrifyingchapter in the centuries-long history of Jews in Lviv.The bulk of the work is concerned with Rabbi Kahane's experiences in the Lvivghetto and in the Janowski labor camp. Rabbi Kahane is sparing in his prose andrecounts horror after horror in a dry, emotionless tone that somehow reveals aglimpse of the nature of human existence in what Alexander Donat has called "theHolocaust Kingdom." For example: "He [a German officer] was standing in front ofJewish women, counting them with a blow of the whip on the face. Among thewomen I recognized those who had been seized with us that morning.... Severaldays later I learned that all of them were shot" (p. 92). Kahane concludes by providingthe simple reason for these murders: "At that time no camp for women existed."Another disturbing example:In the kitchen the unconscious woman still lay on the floor. She was bleeding and her child,blissfully unaware, kept playing with her thick hair. My eyes met with his blue pure and smilingeyes. They were joyous, these child's eyes, radiant and full of vitality, despite the deatheverywhere around us. (p. 81)In the summer of 1943, Rabbi Kahane escaped the Janowski camp and fled toMetropolitan Sheptyts'kyi's residence. Months earlier, the remnants of the Lviv rabbinatehad successfully petitioned the metropolitan to shelter their most preciouspossessions: hundreds of Jewish children and the Torah scrolls, both of which wereprime targets of the Nazi destruction process. With the children was Kahane'sthree-year-old daughter as well as his wife, who entered a Studite convent. Themetropolitan quickly took Rabbi Kahane under his care and, disguised as BrotherMateusz, he worked in the library cataloguing Judaica and teaching Hebrew. Thelast third of his memoirs concern his concealment by the metropolitan and containmany reflections on Ukrainian-Jewish relations, such as:How difficult it is to reconcile the two sections of the Ukrainian people. On one hand, all thenational Ukrainian heroes... and every national reawakeningor uprising were always connectedwith spilling rivers of Jewish blood. The Ukrainians have always vented their wrathagainst the Jews. On the other hand, there are the noble figuresof the metropolitan, his brotherthe abbot... and others. How is this possible? How can one reconcile these two opposites?(p. 136)Jerzy Michalowicz's translation from the original Hebrew publication (Yomangeto Lvov [Jerusalem, 1978]) is generally quite readable, with the occasionalmalapropism, such as "the light of projectors" (p. 97) rather than "searchlights"(ha-zarkorim). The editing of the text, however, is terrible, and the translation is riddledwith errors from the very first line to the last appendix. While most of these areminor, some involve names and dates; thus, the English version cannot be consideredauthoritative for the serious scholar. The English text is <strong>also</strong> not identical tothe Hebrew. Erich Goldhagen's interesting but brief foreword is no substitute for theoriginal's longer scholarly introduction by Dov Sadan, and the English version hasreplaced the short but useful historical overview of the Holocaust in Lviv with twotangential appendices of lesser importance. The Hebrew version <strong>also</strong> includes a

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