In Search of Lost Times and Places: Simon Rawidowicz Reflects on his Formative Years in Grajewo and Białystok

All those who knew my father, Simon Rawidowicz, personally or heard him lecture appreciated his magnetic personality, wide range of knowledge, and sense of humour that under the influence of events could often become gallows humour.¹ He could engage in meaningful conversation with scholars and intellectuals in their own fields, spanning the range of European—including Russian—philosophy, literature, and history, as well as the other humanities and social sciences. This was evident to me as a teenager (I was only 20 years old when he suddenly passed away), as I heard him interact with his Brandeis University colleagues and their spouses who enjoyed coming to our home for social gatherings, at which he would regale them with stories and epigrams from rabbinic and hasidic literature and the world of Polin.

These qualities emerged to a limited extent in his published writings but even more so in his letters and especially those written to members of his family, almost all of whom settled in Mandatory Palestine in the early 1920s. These family letters, written almost entirely in Hebrew, from the time of his arrival in Berlin in 1919 until his death in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1957, constitute a diary, or what today might be called a blog. In them, he related what he was doing and thinking, his plans, hopes, and concerns, his activities, the people he was meeting, events in the Jewish—especially Hebraic and Zionist—world and in the world in general, especially as they related to Zionism, antisemitism, and the Holocaust.

Increasingly, after the death of his father, Chaim Yitzhak Rawidowicz, Rawidowicz would reminisce about the days of his childhood and youth in Grajewo and Białystok, which he left at the age of 22. He was very close to his father, who had instilled in him a deep love of Erets Yisra'el, initiated him into the Hebrew language by speaking it at home on the sabbath and holidays, and introduced him to Maimonides' Mishneh torah, which was to concern him for the rest of his life.² Certainly the fate of that world during the Holocaust further stimulated his recollecting, as did life-cycle events in the family, including the births of children, birthdays, weddings, and above all the anniversaries of the death of his mother, Chana Batya, 6 Elul (20 August) 1920, and of his father, 20 Elul (7 September) 1936. His siblings treasured these letters and preserved them,³ and after his death his brother Abraham in Tel Aviv, with whom he was especially close, transcribed some sections of them—since Rawidowicz's handwriting is often not easy to decipher, especially for those unfamiliar with the subject matter and literary style— and arranged for the typing of over 200 pages of excerpts. Abraham continued to receive more letters from his brothers and sisters in the State of Israel until his own death in 1973, and they are now in my possession. Subsequently, as my cousins settled the estates of their parents, they sent me all the additional letters they found, and I even received two more in the summer of 2014 as I was completing this chapter.

To borrow a phrase often used by Rawidowicz, unfortunately all too often in vain given his premature passing, im ezkeh lekhakh—difficult to translate but perhaps best rendered slightly freely as: 'if I am fortunate enough . . .'—it is my hope, im ezkeh lekhakh, to prepare on the basis of these letters an extensive annotated narrative that will result in the closest possible approximation to the projected autobiographical memoir that Rawidowicz was never 'fortunate enough' to write. In the interim, to stress the importance of the following recollections, it seems appropriate to paraphrase the opening lines of one of the most famous poems of Rawidowicz's close associate of his earlier Berlin days, Hayim Nahman Bialik: 'if you wish to know the source from which Rawidowicz drew his strength and inspiration, go to Grajewo and Białystok of old'.⁴

A word on translation: Rawidowicz's Hebrew...