Abstract
In this meticulously prepared study Alan Rosen focuses on an under-researched aspect of Holocaust studies: that is calendars which were produced secretly in ghettos and camps and each of which represents a ‘special attempt to map Jewish time’ (p.121) by marking religious holidays and sometimes other dates. Rosen is a historian concerned with the specific facts behind the production and transmission of a disparate corpus of primary sources and an eminent specialist of Jewish culture who discusses hypotheses about their symbolic significance. He has identified and consulted around 40 calendars deposited in archives in numerous countries, including the United States, the Czech Republic and Israel. The calendars themselves are mainly bicultural in that they combine both the Hebrew and Gregorian traditions. As the Hebrew year is ‘lunisolar’, it requires expert knowledge to establish when religious holidays fall, presenting a particular challenge to their compilers in this period of unprecedented persecution.
Rosen argues that the Holocaust gave new meanings to everyday objects such as the calendars which are the subject of his monograph. Throughout he highlights the persistent agency of Jewish communities in documenting their experience. While the calendars show that ‘the way Jews saw the world . . . imploded before their eyes” (p. x), their authors developed materials to hang on to the passing of time: ‘even under restrictive conditions, calendars were produced, distributed, and regularly consulted . . . to give the experience of time, reason and order’ (p. 6). Preparing a calendar was an act of resilience, a refusal to be assimilated, and showed an unwillingness ‘to settle for a scrap of time or the rhythms of a different culture that would accompany the predicament of hiding’ (p.169).
The book is divided thematically according to the contexts in which the calendars were made. Those designed in the ghettos of Lodz, Warsaw and Lublin in Poland, Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, and the internment camp of Drancy on the edge of Paris were printed in secret, sometimes handwritten and painted, but they could also be hidden inside an out-of-date pocket diary written in Polish. They served as an ‘interior chronicle’, ‘cultivating a common memory among the ghetto’s Jews’ (p.33), but mostly they transmitted the ‘necessary information for Jewish observance of special days’ (p. 35), while sometimes also conveying contemporary commemorations.
Rosen has tracked down nine calendars produced in the concentration camps, the very transmission of which shows the significance they held. For instance, the 1945 ‘Westerbork Calendar’ is by necessity handwritten and records only Gregorian dates; days are organized in weeks without mention of significant moments, such as holidays. The only discrete events are 12 April and 26 October where crosses appear in the daily checkboard pattern. This graphic choice may be related to the camp’s liberation and then its post-war transformation. Rosen thus talks about a ‘calendar without memory’ (p. 111) and suggests that this calendar displays ‘its moral mission’, differentiating ‘the time lived as a prisoner and that of a free human being’ (p. 112).
In the first and the last chapters, Rosen deals with two equally singular cases. The first gathers calendars documenting the turn of the Fifty-Seventh Jewish Century, corresponding to the summer of 5699, or 1939 in the Common Era, which year – however it is demarcated – saw the outbreak of the Second World War. Some of these calendars transmitted messages of fear, others of hope. Rosen’s concluding chapter focuses on the Lubavitcher Rebbes’ Wartime Calendar Book, intended to be programmatic and reflecting a ‘sense of urgency to act on behalf of those trapped in Nazi-occupied Europe’ (p. 209). This calendar was published in the United States in 1943 by the Rebbe Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn and Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn; it was designed to be a spiritual programme to alleviate suffering. This response to the extreme violence against European Jewish communities continued long after the war as calendars were re-edited and translated during the whole of the second half of the twentieth century.
A glossary, details of the Jewish calendar year in an appendix, and colour photos help non-experts in the field. Throughout Rosen documents the diversity of constraints and violence European Jewish communities faced in their daily life during the Nazi occupation. He details how the experience of genocide changed time perceptions and how this historical context shaped the manufacture and significance of calendars. However, this is less a book about violence and disastrous times than about resilience: Jewish Europeans developed ingenious ways of perpetuating their rites and culture in the face of persecution, which deeply affected all attempts at religious observance. Rosen highlights the distinction between religious and cultural significance of these Jewish calendars to argue that these two dimensions were intricately linked during the Holocaust.