Girl with Two Landscapes: The Wartime Diary of Lena Jedwab, 1941–1945: Reading Resources

In the summer of 1941, Lena Jedwab, a sixteen-year-old native of Bialystock, was a counselor at a summer camp for young Communist Pioneers. At the start of the Second World War, Bialystock, formerly part of Poland, had come under Soviet occupation. But with the Nazi invasion that June, the Jewish residents of Bialystock were placed in immediate peril. Along with her fellow campers, Lena was evacuated to Karakulino, deep in the interior of the Soviet Union, where she survived the war in a children’s home apart from her parents or family, whose fate she did not know. It was then, in October of 1941, that Lena began to keep a diary that she would continue through the end of the war, and which has now been published as Girl With Two Landscapes: The Wartime Diary of Lena Jedwab 1941–1945.

Like other young wartime diarists, Lena’s writing contains a mix of the prosaic and the exceptional, the hopes and dreams of youth against the backdrop of hardship and an uncertain future. Like other diarists, Lena’s journal is both a means of preserving the historical moment and of creating the author’s sense of self through the act of writing. As Professor Yitzkhok Niborski writes in his introduction to the Yiddish version, the diary is “a tool, a means of saving herself, that the diarist used in order to maintain her mental clarity and emotional equilibrium at a time when catastrophic events had erased all the familiar signs by which a person normally locates his place in the world.”

Unlike some of her more famous peers—most notably, Anne Frank—Lena provides us with a perspective that has received relatively little attention: the fate of Jewish refugees in the Soviet Union. And unlike other diarists, Lena consciously chose to write in Yiddish, despite her fluency in both Polish and Russian. In one of the book’s memorable incidents, she found a story by I. L. Peretz in Russian translation, and translated it back into the Yiddish “original” for the benefit of her friends and fellow refugees. Throughout her time in the Soviet Union, and for the rest of her life, Lena would be a fierce advocate for Yiddish language and culture. As Niborski writes, “Lena’s struggle for her linguistic identity is no less moving than her desire for love, for recognition, and for happiness.”

The diary, which was preserved in handwritten form for decades, was eventually transcribed and published in Yiddish by Lena’s husband, Sholem Rozenberg, before its translation into English by Solon Beinfeld.

Four Questions

To get you started before you crack open the collection, here are four questions to keep in mind while you read.

1. Have you read any other Holocaust diaries, like Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl? How is Girl With Two Landscapes similar, or different?
2. Diaries like Lena Jedwab’s are by definition written by young, inexperienced writers. What do you think of Lena’s writing? Do you think it shows maturity in style or content?
3. Girl With Two Landscapes portrays the fate of many Jews who survived the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, a subject often overlooked in Holocaust remembrance. What did you learn about this subject from Lena’s diary? Did it cause you to look at this period in a new way?
4. Lena is fiercely committed to the Yiddish language, unlike many of her peers. Why do you think this is? How did it influence her writing and experience?

—Ezra Glinter

Explore the below sections to learn more about Girl with Two Landscapes

Q&A with Translator Solon Beinfeld

Yiddish Book Center: How did you discover this book? What made you want to translate it?

Solon Beinfeld: I knew the Rozenberg family from Paris. They were activists in the Medem Library. I was there often enough that I too became a frequent visitor to the library and got to know the people there. I knew her husband better than I knew Lena, but I knew her too. I mentioned to Sholem that I had been asked to translate some diary entries for a collection that Yale University Press was going to publish called Salvaged Pages, and he said, “Maybe you could translate some entries from my wife’s diary?” It had already been published in Yiddish, so I was working from a printed copy. And he sent my translations to his daughter Dorothée, who happened to live in Cambridge, Mass., which is where I live. She called and said “I love your translation, it sounds like my mother speaking English.” When I got home, Dorothée said, “why don’t you translate the whole thing?”

Yiddish Book Center: Did you ever talk to Lena about the translation?

Beinfeld: I didn’t talk to her about it because at the time I knew her I had no idea about the diary. In my conversations with her, I never touched on the subject of her years in Karakulino. I learned about this only afterwards. And she may have already had some kind of Alzheimers. On a later visit to Paris I asked Sholem if I could see her. He was reluctant for me to see her in her condition, but I was persistent, I wanted to pay my respects. She was physically ok, but mentally not all there. So I was never ever able to talk to her about the diary.

Yiddish Book Center: You were translating from the printed version, but did you ever see, or work from, Lena’s handwritten manuscripts?

Beinfeld: I have seen some of the original, but not much of it. So I can’t vouch for every word in the printed version, but I think Sholem did a good job of faithfully restoring the diary. There are some illegible passages where he says it’s illegible and didn’t try to fill them in himself.

Yiddish Book Center: Why did this diary interest you? Why do you think it’s of general interest?

Beinfeld: First and foremost, it’s a document from a phenomenon that is not so well known. That is, the experience of people, and in this case of a teenager, who were evacuated into the interior of the Soviet Union and who experienced the war years in a different way. Not an easy way, but a better way than being under the Nazis. Not only were there people who were evacuated, like Lena, but those who were deported, like her husband. There were hundreds of thousands of people who survived the occupation in the unoccupied parts of the Soviet Union. So this is a certain part of the Jewish wartime experience.

The other reason is the role of Yiddish in the diary. She clings to Yiddish and defends Yiddish at every opportunity. She is cut off from her Yiddish world, but she does what she can to maintain a mental and spiritual contact with it. She could have written in Polish or Russian, but she kept the diary in Yiddish, maybe to keep it away from prying eyes, but also to continue a conversation in Yiddish with herself. She is a product of the Yiddish-speaking world and takes her attachment with her wherever she goes, even in the most difficult circumstances. So this is a lifetime commitment to Yiddish carried out even in circumstances of extreme deprivation. And she experiences some condescension as well, people who look down on her Yiddish education.

Yiddish Book Center: Why do you think she felt this way about Yiddish, when many others didn’t?

Beinfeld: I think the key to this is the two years of the Soviet occupation of Bialystock. Bialystock was attached to the Soviet zone after 1939 and was technically part of the Bylorussian Soviet Republic. It became the center of a kind of Soviet Yiddish culture. By that time the Soviet Union had cooled considerably on their support for Yiddish culture, but in the newly annexed territories they revived their use of Yiddish as a tool of assimilation and acculturation. The Hebrew schools were closed, but the Yiddish schools were supported and for two years she had been studying at a Yiddish high school. So she is the product of an environment where Yiddish is highly valued. In pre-war Bialystock there were Zionists and religious people who were not so keen on Yiddish education. But in the most recent period she was in a pro-Yiddish environment as supported by the Soviet authorities. And it goes to her support for the Soviet Union in general. She is somewhat critical of Soviet institutions but there is no question that she is supportive of the Soviet Union in general in its war against Nazi Germany.

Yiddish Book Center: How do you think it compares to other Holocaust diaries?

Beinfeld: The setting is so very different. But it shares the experience of being young. So it’s also about growing up under difficult circumstances but maintaining, like Anne Frank, a positive attitude. Finding things to feel positive about even though the food situation is terrible and the physical situation is terrible. She is active in the activities of the children’s home. She finds hope in nature, and often visits the Kama River which is nearby. She maintains her interest in literature, even German books. She’s someone who as a young person retains her identity and manages under these very adverse conditions to grow and to mature. So that is similar to the other diaries. On the other hand, she’s not under occupation and she’s not in a situation where if the war isn’t over soon she’ll be dead. So it is one of the more positive documents, and also a pro-Soviet document. Not that she admires everything about the Soviet Union or the collective farm where she goes to work. Still, on the whole, the Soviet system is one that is supporting her and will enable her to live through the war. So it is one of the few really pro-Soviet documents. I’m old enough to remember the war, and I remember even my staunchly anti-Communist parents supported the Soviet Union because they were fighting the Nazis. We were all sort of pro-Soviet in those days, because what choice did we have?

Yiddish Book Center: Were there any particular difficulties, or questions of translation that you found interesting? How did it compare to other translation experiences?

Beinfeld: It was not a difficult diary to translate—there were some Soviet terms that I had to go and look up, but that was only occasional. Also, her Yiddish is extremely good. Her Bialystock dialect is on the border between the Litvak and Polish dialects. It’s the westernmost and southernmost outpost of Litvak Yiddish, so it’s almost a kind of classic dialect, and is easy for anyone to understand. And that’s true of her spoken Yiddish as well—very clear and elegant. She’s not from an elegant family, she’s working class, but there’s something about Bialystock and Bialystock Yiddish that comes across as slightly literary in style.

Multimedia Resources

Read the original Yiddish version of Lena Jedwab’s wartime diary in the Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library.

Watch an oral history interview with Lena Jedwab-Rozenberg and husband, Sholem Rozenberg.

Watch an oral history interview with translator Solon Beinfeld.

Watch the recording of the presentation by Dorothée Rozenberg, daughter of Lena Jedwab-Rozenberg. 

Listen to a podcast interview with Lena’s daughter, Dorthée Rozenberg.

Listen to a podcast interview with Solon Beinfeld, about his role in creating the Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary.

Listen to an interview with Szulim Rozenberg and Dovid Braun on Dos Yiddish Kol. The interview aired on Wednesday, August 28, 2002. Szulim starts speaking about the diary at minute 15.