The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation

Notes on Contributors

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS DINA ABRAMOWICZ began her career as a librarian in  at the Jewish Children’s Library in Vilna. After the German occupation of Lithuania in , she worked at the Vilna Ghetto Library. Later, she escaped to a camp of Jewish resistance fighters. After the war, she studied librarianship at Columbia University. She joined the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, where she was Head Librarian until , and subsequently Research Librarian. She died on  April , at age . This book is dedicated to her. ZACHARY M. BAKER is Reinhard Family Curator of Judaica and Hebraica Collections at the Stanford University Libraries. He was Head Librarian of YIVO from  to , and he has compiled The Bibliography of Eastern European Memorial (Yizkor) Books since . He is editor of Judaica Librarianship, and from  to  he contributed the Yiddish books bibliography to the Jewish Book Annual. ARLEN VIKTOROVICH BLIUM was born  March  in Melitopol’, Ukraine. After his father was arrested in , his grandmother took him to Orenburg in the Ural Mountains, where he finished high school. (He learned only in the late s that his father had been shot in .) Blium went on to complete a doctoral degree at the Bibliography Department of the Leningrad Library Institute and has been teaching there since . (Today it is known as the Department of Information and Library Science of the St. Petersburg Academy of Culture.) While still a graduate student, Blium became interested in censorship research, but at that time he could only publish work about pre-Soviet Russia of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nevertheless, in the s, he quietly began to study Soviet censorship. The advent of perestroika in the late s finally gave Blium access to archival materials that had been off limits. All of this work resulted in two recent books. The first is Za kulisami “Ministerstva Pravdy”: Tainaia istoriia sovetskoi tsenzury, – [Behind the scenes at the “Ministry of Truth”: The secret history of Soviet censorship , –] (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, ). Donna M. Farina has translated one chapter from this work, “Forbidden Topics: Early Soviet Censorship Directives ” [“O chem nel’zia pisat’: tsenzurnye tsirkuliary”], published in Book History  (): –. The excerpt translated here is from his latest book, Evreiskii vopros pod sovetskoitsenzuroi [The Jewish question under Soviet censorship] (St. Petersburg: Peterburgskii evreiskii universitet, ). Letters to Arlen Blium can be sent to: Russia/Rossiia,  Sankt-Peterburg, ul. Belinskogo, d. , kv. . GEORGE DURMAN was born in  in Kirov, Russia, where his family was living in evacuation during World War II. He received his master’s degree in Russian literature and language from the Moscow Pedagogical Institute in . From  to  he was a Senior Fellow at the Moscow Literary Museum, giving lectures and writing articles. He immigrated to the United States in  and received master’s degrees in Slavic literatures and library science from the University of Illinois at Urbana. He is Senior Librarian at the Bayonne Public Library in New Jersey, where he has worked since . Durman’s research interests are Russian intellectual history, Russian literature, and Russian rare books. DONNA M. FARINA received a Licence de linguistique and Maîtrise de sciences du langage from the Université des Sciences Humaines, Strasbourg, France, and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is an associate professor at New Jersey City University. She has worked on dictionary projects for Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press and as a reader in the Oxford English Dictionary North American program. Her main research interest is the history of lexicography, especially Russian dictionaries. She has published articles in Lexicographica: International Annual for Lexicography, International Journal of Lexicography, and other journals. DAVID E. FISHMAN is Professor of Jewish History and Chair of the Department of Jewish History at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and Senior Research Associate at YIVO. He is the author of Russia’s First Modern Jews and coeditor of YIVO-bleter, YIVO’s Yiddish-language scholarly journal. LEONIDAS E. HILL, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of British Columbia , has edited Die Weizsäcker Papiere, – () and Die Weizsäcker Papiere, –  (). He has published articles about Ernst von Weizsäcker and German foreign policy, the German foreign office in the Nazi era, resistance to the Nazi regime, the – November  pogrom in Germany and Austria, the political memoirs of leading Nazis, Walter Gyssling and the Centralverein, and the legal trial of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel in Canada. He also edited and wrote an introduction for Walter Gyssling, Mein Leben in Deutschland...