The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust. By Lisa Moses Leff.: New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. 286. $29.95. ISBN: 9780199380954.

Jewish History (2016) 30: 123127 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016 DOI: 10.1007/s10835-016-9260-y

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Web End = The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust. By Lisa Moses Leff.

New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. 286. $29.95. ISBN: 9780199380954.

VICKI CARON

Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA E-mail: [email protected]

In her remarkable book The Archive Thief, Lisa Moses Leff recounts the fascinating story of Zosa Szajkowski, who worked as a researcher at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City from the late 1940s until his suicide in 1978, an act he committed after he was caught stealing materials from the New York Public Library. While Szajkowskis personal story is of interest in itself, Leff uses his biography as a fulcrum to open up a vast panorama of the state of Jewish archives and libraries after World War II. Although most scholars think of archives and libraries as xed entities, Leff demonstrates that nearly all of these institutions were either created or recongured after 1945. As the major centers of Jewish life shifted from Europe to the United States and Israel, documentation from Europe was transferred to these new centers, and Szajkowski played a key role in this process. In writing this story, Leff compels us to reconsider how archives and libraries were built and to reect on how this process has shaped historical scholarship.

Born in a Polish shtetl in 1911, Szajkowski emigrated to France in 1927, following in the footsteps of three siblings. Already a member of the Communist Party, he worked as a journalist for the Yiddish communist newspaper Naye Presse. He became disenchanted with communism, however, after the Communist Party eliminated its Yiddish language section in 1937. Around this time, he met Elias (Ilya) Tcherikover, a historian who had been afliated with YIVO in Vilnius, and his wife, Rebecca (Riva). Through them Szajkowski was introduced to the scientic methodology of YIVO, which was heavily inuenced by the historian Simon Dubnow. Dubnow believed that Jews constituted a nation and insisted that their national history, like that of other nations, had to be based on a documentary record shorn of any ideological overlay.

When World War II broke...