Copyright

Leshchinsky, Yankev;

Published On

2023-03-08

Page Range

pp. 81–94

Language

  • English

Print Length

14 pages

6. Jews are collapsing in the streets from hunger

  • Yankev Leshchinsky (author)
  • Robert Brym (translator)
  • Eli Jany (translator)
Chapter of: The Last Years of Polish Jewry: Volume 1: At the Edge of the Abyss: Essays, 1927–33 (pp. 81–94)

Hunger is becoming increasingly widespread among Polish Jews, with some collapsing in the street. Weakness is not just physical but spiritual: Polish Jewry is feeling abandoned, disorganized, without movements to galvanize them and give them hope in the future. Suicides are now everyday occurrences, and they are reported in the press. They take place even among devout Jews with families. State discrimination against Jews, the failure of the state to take action against pogromists, and the indifference of the Polish masses, including the Polish working class, are the main factors explaining the hopelessness growing in the Jewish community. Hopelessness, despondency, and exhaustion have even reached a point where Jews have done little to create Jewish self-defence organizations.

Contributors

Yankev Leshchinsky

(author)

Robert Brym

(translator)
SD Clark Professor of Sociology Emeritus and an Associate of the Centre for Jewish Studies at University of Toronto
https://utoronto.academia.edu/RobertBrym

Robert Brym, FRSC, is SD Clark Professor of Sociology Emeritus and an Associate of the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. His latest works include Robert Brym and Randal Schnoor, eds, The Ever-Dying People? Canada’s Jews in Comparative Perspective (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023) and “Jews and Israel 2024: Canadian Attitudes, Jewish Perceptions,” Canadian Jewish Studies/Études Juives Canadiennes (38: 2024), 6–89. For downloads of Brym’s published work, visit https://utoronto.academia.edu/RobertBrym

Eli Jany

(translator)
PhD student in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Centre for Jewish Studies at University of Toronto

Eli Jany is a PhD student in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. He has translated poems by Sarah Reisen (In geveb, 12 May 2020, https://ingeveb.org/texts-and-translations/three-poems-reisen) and, with Robert Brym, co-translated volume 1 of The Last Years of Polish Jewry and “Jewish Economic Life in Yiddish Literature: Yitskhok Ber Levinzon and Yisroel Aksenfeld,” East European Jewish Affairs (53, 1: 2024), both by Yankev Leshchinsky.