S.L. Shneiderman

S.L. Shneiderman (15 June 1906 – 8 October 1996) was a prominent Polish-American Jewish writer, journalist, translator and poet, who wrote in both Yiddish and English.

As a journalist, he covered 1930s Paris and reported on the Spanish Civil War before immigrating to the United States in 1940. His works in Yiddish, ''Arthur Szyk'' (1980), ''Tsvishn shrek un hofenung'' (1947), and ''Ven di Visl hot geredt Yidish'' (1970) were among the “1000 Essential Yiddish Books” noted by the Yiddish Book Center. His English books include ''Between Fear and Hope'' (1947), ''The Warsaw Heresy'' (1959), and ''The River Remembers'' (1978).

Early life and career

Shneiderman was born as Szmuel Lejb Sznajderman (Yiddish: ) in Kazimierz Dolny, Congress Poland in the Russian Empire. Shneiderman grew up going to both a religious Jewish elementary school and a Polish middle school. He moved to Warsaw in 1925 to study literature and journalism at the Free Polish University (Polish: ). There, he wrote poems about poverty, unemployment, industrial expansion, the rejection of militarism, and an idealized, pastoral Polish village life. He published two books of poems: ''Gilderne Feigl'' (') in 1927 and ''Feyern in Shtot'' (') in 1932. Some of these poems were reproduced and appeared in the leading Yiddish weekly in Warsaw at the time, ''Literarische Bletter'' (').

His first few years in interwar Warsaw were marked by a renewal in Jewish creative culture and a flourishing Jewish avant-garde artistic movement. Shneiderman experimented with genres of Yiddish writing beyond poetry, interviewing Polish writers, translating poems and novels into Yiddish, and writing songs for the Yiddish theater.

He also took an interest in cinema as a politically powerful art form. In September 1928, Shneiderman published two articles in the first issue of the (short-lived) first Yiddish journal devoted to cinema, '' Film Velt'' (Film World), published in Warsaw and edited by Saul Goskin and Mark Tannenbaum. In his first article, “Film has Deep Meaning,” Shneiderman argued that movie making was an important form of cultural mass entertainment and emphasized the social significance of the cinema. His second essay, published under the pseudonym “Emil”, “Behind the Scenes of ''In the Polish Woods''”, narrated the production of the eponymous movie based on the novel by Yosef Opatoshu.

In 1933, he married Eileen (Hala) Szymin, (1908–2004), the daughter of Regina and Benjamin Szymin, a major publisher of Hebrew and Yiddish books in Warsaw. After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, her parents, who lived in Otwock, were imprisoned in the Otwock and Warsaw ghettos. They were both killed by the Nazis. Eileen was the older sister of David “Chim” Seymour, a Polish photojournalist and co-founder of Magnum Photos, famous for his photographs of the Spanish Civil War and of child war refugees after World War II. Eileen devoted herself to preserving and promoting Chim’s work after his death in 1956, including organizing a 1996 exhibit at the International Center of Photography, where she became an honorary trustee. Eileen was a partner in their travels and participated in researching and editing S.L. Shneiderman's writings in both Yiddish and English.

The couple moved to Paris in 1933, where he worked as a journalist and correspondent for various Polish and Yiddish daily newspapers. Under the influence of Egon Erwin Kisch, Shneiderman began to write prose. He published his first volume of reportages, ''Zvishn Nalewkes un Eifel-Turm'' (English: Between Nalewsky and the Eiffel Tower) in 1935, with a foreword by Kisch, and in Polish ''Od Nalewek do Wieży Eiffla'' in 1936.

Between 1936 and 1938, Shneiderman reported on the Spanish Civil War and anti-fascist politics in Yiddish. He published his reportages in ''Krig in Shpanyen: Hinterland'' (English: The War in the Spanish Hinterland) in 1938, including his brother-in-law Chim’s photographs of the conflict. Some of the pieces Shneiderman published on the Spanish Civil war were later translated into Hebrew in Mandatory Palestine. His coverage earned him the moniker as the “first Yiddish war reporter.” Translations recently appeared in Polish in 2021 and in Spanish in 2023.

After the collapse of the Spanish Republic in 1939, Shneiderman spent six months in South Africa as part of a lecture tour, where he considered taking a permanent editorship for the Yiddish newspaper ''Afrikaner idishe tsaytung'' (English: African Jewish newspaper) in Johannesburg. Deciding to return to Paris, he stopped and visited Mandatory Palestine (later Israel) for the first time. Amid news of increasing German aggression in Central-Eastern Europe, S.L. Shneiderman and Eileen immigrated to the United States with their young daughter, Helen, in February 1940. After a six-day journey aboard the liner S. S. Manhattan and a week on Ellis Island, they arrived in New York City.

After World War II

Shneiderman was politically committed to modern Jewish nationalism, Jewish identity, Yiddish culture, and Holocaust memory.

After World War II, Shneiderman promoted the publication of Holocaust survivors’ memoirs and testimonies, thereby contributing to making them available to a wider audience. In 1944, he edited the diary of Mary Berg, among the first eyewitness accounts of life and Nazi persecution in the Warsaw Ghetto. Written from the perspective of a teenage girl, ''Warsaw Ghetto: A Diary'' was published in English in 1945, and subsequently translated into Hebrew, Italian, and French. Although Mary Berg withdrew from public discussions, her story gained continued interest and was republished in subsequent editions, most recently by Oneworld Publications as ''The Diary of Mary Berg: Growing up in the Warsaw Ghetto'' in 2009.

Shneiderman also edited and published the diary of Gemma La Guardia Gluck, after encountering evidence on her arrest and incarceration as a political hostage while covering the 1961 Eichmann trial. Upon visiting her in Queens, New York, Shneiderman discovered she had kept a handwritten journal of her time in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. S.L. Shneiderman edited the manuscript and published it in 1961 under the title ''My Story''.

In 1946, Shneiderman visited the postwar ruins of Poland. Out of this trip came two travelogues, ''Zvishn Shrek un Hofenung'' (English: Between Fear and Hope), and ''Ven di Vaysl hot geredt Yidish'' (English: ''The River Remembers,'' or ''When the Vistula Spoke Yiddish'') published in Yiddish in 1970 and in English in 1978, for which Shneiderman was awarded the Bergen Belsen Remembrance Award. The travelogues document Jewish shtetl life in Poland from the 11th century to the 1970s, and the destruction wrought by the Nazis and Polish Communist rule on Jewish life.  Shneiderman's work illustrates the many traces of pre-war Jewish life in Poland. Stopping in Łódź shortly after the Kielce pogrom

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