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A history of Mel Brooks as a ‘disobedient Jew’
(JTA) — Jeremy Dauber subtitles his new biography of Mel Brooks “Disobedient Jew.” It’s a phrase that captures two indivisible aspects of the 96-year-old director, actor, producer and songwriter.
The “Jew” is obvious. Born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn in 1926, Brooks channeled the Yiddish accents and Jewish sensibilities of his old neighborhoods into characters like the 2000 Year Old Man — a comedy routine he worked up with his friend, the writer and director Carl Reiner. He worked Jewish obsessions into films like 1967’s “The Producers,” which features two scheming Jewish characters who stage a sympathetic Broadway musical about Hitler in order to bilk their investors.
Brooks’ signature move is to inject Jews into every aspect of human history and culture, which can be seen in the forthcoming Hulu series “History of the World, Part II.” A sequel to his 1981 film, “History of the World, Part I,” it parodies historical episodes in a style he honed as a writer on 1950s television programs such as “Your Show of Shows,” whose writers’ rooms were stocked with a galaxy of striving Jewish comedy writers just like him.
The “Disobedient” part describes Brooks’ relationship to a movie industry that he conquered starting in the early 1970s. In a series of parodies of classic movie genres — the Western in “Blazing Saddles,” the horror movie in “Young Frankenstein,” Alfred Hitchcock in “High Anxiety — he would gently, sometimes crudely and always lovingly bite the hand that was feeding him quite nicely: In 1976, he was fifth on the list of top 10 box office attractions, just behind Clint Eastwood.
Dauber describes the parody Brooks mastered as “nothing less than the essential statement of American Jewish tension between them and us, culturally speaking; between affection for the mainstream and alienation from it.”
Dauber is professor of Jewish literature and American studies at Columbia University, whose previous books include “Jewish Comedy” and “American Comics: A History.” “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” is part of the Jewish Lives series of brief interpretative biographies from Yale University Press.
Dauber and I spoke about why America fell for a self-described “spectacular Jew” from Brooklyn, Brooks’ lifelong engagement with the Holocaust, and why “Young Frankenstein” may be Brooks’ most Jewish movie.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “History of the World, Part II” comes out March 6. “History of the World, Part I” may not be in the top tier of Brooks films, but it seems to touch on so many aspects of his career that you trace in your book: the parody of classic movie forms, the musical comedy, injecting Jews into every aspect of human civilization, and the anything-for-a-laugh sensibility.
Jeremy Dauber: I agree. There’s the one thing that really brings it home, and it’s probably the most famous or infamous scene from the film. That’s the Spanish Inquisition scene. You have Brooks sort of probing the limits of bad taste. He had done that most famously in “The Producers” with its Nazi kickline, but here he takes the same idea — that one of the ways that you attack antisemitism is through ridicule — and turns the persecution of the Jews into a big musical number. It’s his love of music and dance. But the thing that’s almost the most interesting about this is that he takes on the role of the Torquemada character.
As his henchman sing and dance and the Jews face torture, the Brooklyn-born Jew plays the Catholic friar who tormented the Jews.
That’s right. And what’s the crime that he accuses the Jews of? “Don‘t be boring! Don‘t be dull!” That’s the worst thing that you can be. It’s his way of saying, “If I have a religion, you know, it is show business.”
His fascination with showbiz seems inseparable from his Jewishness, as if being a showbiz Jew is a denomination in its own right.
One of my favorite lines of his is when he marries [actress] Anne Bancroft, who of course is not Jewish. And he says, “She doesn’t have to convert: She’s a star.” If you’re a star, if you’re a celebrity, you’re kind of in your own firmament faith-wise, and so it’s okay. Showbiz is this faith. But it is very Jewish, because show business is a way to acceptance. It’s a way that America can love him as a Jew, as Mel Brooks, as a kid from the outer boroughs who can grow up to marry Anne Bancroft.
Jeremy Dauber is the author of “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” (Yale University Press)
You write early on that “Mel Brooks, more than any other single figure, symbolizes the Jewish perspective on and contribution to American mass entertainment.” On one foot, can you expand on that?
Jews understand that there’s a path to success and that being embraced by a culture means learning about it, immersing yourself in it, being so deeply involved in it that you understand it and master it. But simultaneously, you’re doing that as a kind of outsider. You’re always not quite in it, even though you’re of it in some deep way. In some ways, it’s the apotheosis of what Brooks does, which is being a parodist. In order to be the kind of parodist that Mel Brooks is, you have to be acutely attuned to every aspect of the cultural medium that you’re parodying. You have to know it inside and outside and backwards and forwards. And Brooks certainly does, but at the same time you have to be able to sort of step outside of it and say, you know, “Well, I’m watching a Western, but come on, what’s going on with these guys? Like why doesn’t anyone ever, you know, pass gas after eating so many beans?”
You have this great phrase, that to be an American Jew is to be part of the “loyal opposition.”
That’s right. Brooks at his best is always kind of poking and prodding at convention, but loyally. He’s not like the countercultural figures of his day. He’s a studio guy. He’s really within the system, but is poking at the system as well.
You wrote in that vein about his 1963 short film, “The Critic,” which won him an Oscar. Brooks plays an old Jewish man making fun of an art film.
On the one hand, he’s doing it in the voice of one of his older Jewish relatives, the Jewish generation with an Eastern European accent, to make fun of these kinds of intellectuals. He’s trying to channel the everyman’s response to high art. “What is this I’m watching? I don’t understand this at all.” On the other hand, Brooks is much more intellectual than he’s often given credit for.
For me the paradox of Brooks’ career is conveyed in a phrase that appears a couple of times in the book: “too Jewish.” The irony is that the more he leaned into his Jewishness, the more successful he got, starting with the “2000 Year Old Man” character, in which he channels Yiddish dialect in a series of wildly successful comedy albums with his friend Carl Reiner. How do you explain America’s embrace of these extremely ethnic tropes?
Brooks’ great motion pictures of the late 1960s and 1970s sort of track with America’s embrace of Jewishness. You have “The Graduate,” which came out at around the same time as “The Producers,” and which showed that someone like Dustin Hoffman can be a leading man. It doesn’t have to be a Robert Redford. You have Allan Sherman and all these popular Jewish comedians. You have “Fiddler on the Roof” becoming one of Broadway’s biggest hits. That gives Brooks license to kind of jump in with both feet. In the 1950s, writing on “The Show of Shows” for Sid Caesar, the Jewishness was there but in a very kind of hidden way. Whereas, it’s very hard to watch the 2000 Year Old Man and say, well, that’s not a Jewish product.
What he also avoided — and here I will contrast him with the novelist Philip Roth — were accusations that he was “bad for the Jews.” Philip Roth was told that his negative portrayals of Jewish characters was embarrassing the Jews in front of the gentiles, but for some reason, I don’t remember anyone complaining even though the Max Bialystock character in “The Producers” can be fairly described as a conniving Jew. What made Brooks’ ethnic comedy more palatable to other Jews?
“The Producers” had a lot of pushback, but for a lot of other reasons.
I guess people had enough to deal with when he staged a musical comedy about Hitler.
Exactly. But the other part is that his biggest films are not as explicitly Jewish as something like Roth’s novel “Portnoy’s Complaint.” I actually think “Young Frankenstein” is one of the most Jewish movies that Mel Brooks ever made, but you’re not going to watch “Young Frankenstein” and say, wow, there are Jews all over the place here.
What about “Young Frankenstein,” a parody of classic horror movies, seems quintessentially Jewish?
The script, which is a lot of Gene Wilder and not just Mel Brooks, is really about someone saying, “You know, I don’t have this heritage — I’m trying to fit in with everybody else. My name is Dr. FRAHNK-en-shteen.” And then people say, “No, this is your heritage. You are Dr. Frankenstein.” [Wilder’s character realizes] “it is my heritage, and I’m embracing it. And I’m Frankenstein. And you may find that monstrous but that’s your business.” It’s about assimilation and embracing who you are.
And of course, Wilder as Dr. Frankenstein is unmistakably Jewish, even when he plays a cowboy in “Blazing Saddles.”
Right. Again, by the mid-’70s, you know, you have Gene Wilder and Elliot Gould and Dustin Hoffman, all Jews, in leading roles. “Young Frankenstein” ends up being a movie about coming home and embracing identity, which is playing itself out a lot in American Jewish culture in the 1970s.
I guess I have to go back and watch it for the 14th time with a different point of view.
That’s the fun part of my job.
You talk about what’s happening at the same time as Brooks’ huge success, which is, although he’s a little younger, the emergence of Woody Allen. You describe Brooks and Woody Allen as the voice of American Jewish comedy, but in very different ways. What are the major differences?
Gene Wilder, who worked with both of them, says that working with Allen is like lighting these tiny little candles, and with Brooks, you’re making big atom bombs. The critical knock against Brooks was that he was much more interested in the joke than the story. And I think with the exception maybe of “Young Frankenstein” there’s a lot of truth to that. The jokes are phenomenal, so that’s fine. Allen pretty quickly moved towards a much more narrative kind of film, and so began to be seen as this incredibly intellectual figure. In real life, Allen always claimed that he wasn’t nearly as intellectual as everyone thought, while Brooks had many more kinds of intellectual ambitions than the movie career that he had. There is a counterfactual world in which “The 12 Chairs,” his 1970 movie based on a novel by two Russian Jewish novelists and which nobody talks about, makes a ton of money.
Instead, it bombs, and he makes “Blazing Saddles,” which works out very well for everybody.
Although he does create Brooksfilms, and produces more narrative, serious-minded films like “The Elephant Man” and “84 Charing Cross Road.”
Right, and decides that if he puts his name on these as a director, they’re going to be rejected out of hand. There is a shelf of scholarship on Woody Allen, but if you look at who had influence on America in terms of box office and popularity, it’s Brooks winning in a walk.
You also mention Brooks and Steven Spielberg in the same sentence. Why do they belong together?
Partly because they had huge popular success in the mid-’70s. Brooks is a generation older, but they are hitting their cinematic success at the same time. And they are both movie fans.
Which comes out in their work — Brooks in his film parodies and Spielberg in the films that echo the films he loved as kid.
Until maybe his remake of “West Side Story,” Spielberg is not really a theater guy in the way that Brooks is, when success meant to make it on Broadway. When Brooks was winning all those Tonys in 2001 for the Broadway musical version of “The Producers,” it may have been almost more meaningful for his 5-year-old, or 7- or 8-year-old self than making his incredibly popular pictures.
You also write about Brooks being a small “c” conservative, a bit of a square. Which I think will surprise people who think about the fart jokes and the peepee jokes and all that stuff. And by square, I mean, kind of old showbizzy, even a little prudish sometimes.
I think that’s right. There’s a great moment that I quote at the end of the book where they are trying out the musical version of “The Producers,” and they want to put the word “f–k” in and Brooks is like, “I don’t know if we can do that on Broadway,” and Nathan Lane is like, “Have we met? You’re Mel Brooks!” He’s a 1950s guy.
Another place where this kind of conservatism comes in is when you compare him to other comedians of the 1950s and ’60s — the so-called “sick comics” like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl who were pushing the envelope in terms of subject matter and politics. He wasn’t part of that. He was part of Hollywood. He was trying to make it in network television.
There is an interview in that era when he complained that people who are writing for television are not “dangerous.” Meanwhile, he himself was writing for television. But I think it’s fair to say that “The Producers” was really something different. You didn’t have to be Jewish to be offended by “The Producers.” But as we were saying before, he is more of the loyal opposition, rather than sort of truly out there. He’s not making “Easy Rider.”
An exhibit space at the Museum of Broadway evokes the scenery from the Mel Brooks musical “The Producers.” (NYJW)
“The Producers” is part of Brooks’ lifelong gambit of mocking the Nazis, I think starting when he would sing anti-Hitler songs as a GI in Europe at the tail end of World War II. Later he would remake Jack Benny’s World War II-era anti-Nazi comedy, “To Be or Not to Be.” And then there is the quick “Hitler on Ice” gag in “History of the World, Part I.” Brooks always maintains that mocking Nazis is the ultimate revenge on them, while you note that Woody Allen in “Manhattan” makes almost the opposite argument: that the way to fight white supremacists is with bricks and baseball bats. Did you come down on one side or the other?
To add just a twinge of complication is the fact that Brooks actually fought Nazis, and also had a brother who was shot down in combat. So for me to sit in moral judgment on anybody who fought in World War II is not a place that I want to be. What’s interesting is that Brooks makes a lot of these statements over the course of a career in which Nazism is done, in the past, defeated. Tragically, the events of the last number of years made white supremacy and neo-Nazism a live question again. When “The Producers” was staged as a musical in the early 21st century, people could say, “Okay, Nazism’s time has passed.” It’s not clear to me that we would restage “The Producers” now as a musical on Broadway, when just last week you had actual neo-Nazis handing out their literature outside a Broadway show. It would certainly be a lot more laden than it was in 2001.
Time also caught up with Brooks in his depiction of LGBT characters. Gay characters are the punchlines in “The Producers” and “Blazing Saddles” in ways that have not aged well. But you also note how both movies are about two men who love each other, to the exclusion of women.
There’s an emotive component to him about these male relationships. Bialystok and Bloom [the protagonists in “The Producers”] is a kind of love story. One of the interesting things is that as it became comparatively more comfortable for gay men to live their truth in society and in Hollywood, there was an evolution. In that remake of “To Be or Not to Be,” there is a much more sympathetic gay character who’s not stereotypical.
What other aspects of Brooks’ Jewishness have we not touched upon? For instance, he’s not particularly interested in Judaism as a religion, and ritual and theology rarely come up in his films, even to be mocked.
It’s not something that he’s particularly interested in. To him, being Jewish is a voice and a language. From the beginning of his career the voice is there. What he’s saying in these accents is that this is Jewish history working through me. It is, admittedly, a very narrow slice of Jewish history.
The first- and second-generation children of Jewish immigrants growing up in Brooklyn neighborhoods that were overwhelmingly Jewish.
It was a Jewishness that was aspirational. It was intellectual. It was a musical Jewishness. It was not in the way we use this phrase now, but it was a cultural Jewishness. It was not a synagogue Jewishness or a theological Jewishness. But of course he is Jewish, deeply Jewish. He couldn’t be anything else. And so he didn’t, and thank God for that.
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The Trump administration’s latest affront to Jewish history
President Donald Trump’s administration either does not understand or does not care about the point of the International Criminal Court.
In announcing that the United States would try to “dismantle” the ICC, Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal that “the ICC and its allies seek a standing world tribunal with near-unlimited reach, empowered to override the courts and constitutions of the U.S. and other sovereign states — and to prosecute and arrest our citizens.”
As examples of the court’s potential overreach, he cited the possibility of it taking action in response to activist pleas to prosecute Trump administration officials for deporting people to a notoriously inhumane El Salvador prison — regardless of their country of origin — and calls to treat the administration’s airstrike campaign against alleged drug smuggling boats as a crime against humanity.
The ICC is an imperfect institution. But to argue against its necessity is an affront to Jewish history, which has taught us, over and over again, that a country sometimes needs to be held to international account over its treatment of disempowered minority groups.
Because while the ICC is the self-described court of last resort, meant in large part to complement national courts, it exists at least in part because there are times that national courts — like nation states more generally — do not consider everyone within their borders to be worthy of their protection, and when words like “sovereignty” are used to bludgeon individual human rights and dignity.
The proof of the court’s importance lies in how deeply tied its origin story is to the crimes of the Holocaust, even though the ICC itself was only formally established in the 1990s.
Aryeh Neier, whose family fled Nazi Germany when he was a small child, was instrumental in the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia — the development of which was an important stop on the way to the creation of the ICC. Ben Ferencz, top prosecutor against the Einsatzgruppen at Nuremberg, was a prominent advocate both for the creation of the court and for the adoption of the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the court and the court’s jurisdiction over four core crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. (The U.S. has never ratified that treaty.)
Theodor Meron, who was born in Poland in 1930 and survived the Holocaust before becoming an Israeli diplomat, spent decades as a judge both for the ICTY and for a similar special tribunal for Rwanda. He was part of the delegation that led to the ICC’s establishment in the 1990s, and in 2024, he recommended that the ICC consider issuing warrants for the arrest of both Israeli and Hamas leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity as a result of the Oct. 7 attack and the subsequent Gaza war.
It’s not coincidental that all these men were Jewish, and aware from firsthand experience of the dangers of unchecked national power.
Ben Ferencz deliberately drew a connection between the two in 2011, when he delivered the closing prosecution speech at the first trial ever heard by the ICC at its home in the Hague. “The case we present is a plea of humanity to law,” he said — the same statement he used in his opening statement at the Einsatzgruppen trial.
In a Prospect UK interview in 2024, Meron said he has always been driven by the desire to bring ours closer to being “a world with no holocausts.”
Neier, for his part, has criticized the ICC for its ineffectiveness, despite being one of its leading proponents. But writing in The New York Review of Books over the weekend, Neier — who suggested that Rubio’s announcement may be motivated by the coming Israeli elections — pointed out the court’s continued significance.
“The trial in the International Criminal Court of former President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines is scheduled to get underway this fall. While in power, Duterte presided over the summary executions of many thousands of Filipinos, most of them poor people, because they were suspected of using contraband drugs,” he wrote. “It is a shame to see the United States try to destroy the ICC — the only global institution with a mandate to address such horrors — merely because those subject to its jurisdiction may be Americans or their friends.”
There are those who see the ICC itself as an affront to Jewish history, including prominent Jews who have condemned the ICC over its outstanding warrant out for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrest. They, too, point to Jewish history to make their case: Netanyahu’s office called the warrant a”modern Dreyfus trial,” and Israeli President Isaac Herzog said that “the outrageous decision at the ICC has turned universal justice into a universal laughing stock.” Meanwhile, attorney Alan Dershowitz posted, “The ICC has never indicted Assad. Of course not because he’s neither Israeli nor Jewish.”
Their common argument: that the ICC has become yet another venue for international antisemitism.
But Neier, Ferencz and Meron’s arguments in favor of the court are more persuasive. They didn’t just think the court was important; they saw international law as so necessary that they dedicated their lives to trying to make it matter, in part through the ICC. Meron said he was working for “a universe in which injustice and violence and mistreatment of people on ethnic and religious grounds is less likely.” That vision is only a threat to sovereignty when sovereignty is interested in injustice.
This does not mean that the U.S. government needs to agree with every ICC decision. Nor does it mean that every individual associated with the ICC is above censure. (Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the ICC, was accused of sexual misconduct and is now facing a vote as to whether he will keep his role; Ken Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch, noted that the accusations — and the fact that the ICC Executive Bureau found Khan’s denials lacking credibility — seriously challenge Khan’s ability to do his job.)
What it does mean is this: The ICC does not exist to be friendly — or, for that matter, to be unfriendly — to any country. Nor does it exist to undermine sovereignty, or to treat sovereignty as sacrosanct. To only think of the court in terms of protecting or violating sovereignty is to overlook its real purpose: to protect our shared humanity, and bring justice to people who are no less worthy of dignity or justice than Netanyahu, Rubio or Trump.
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75 artifacts tell the fitful, inspiring, unfinished story of Jews in America
In May 1818, Mordecai Manuel Noah, a prominent Jew of his time and a member of the Madison administration, delivered a discourse on Jewish history on the occasion of a synagogue consecration. One man read Noah’s words with interest, and took pen to paper to say so.
“Your sect by its sufferings has furnished a remarkable proof of the universal spirit of religious intolerance,” the correspondent noted, in elegant cursive. “Our laws have applied the only antidote to this vice, protecting our religious, as they do our civil, rights by putting them all on equal footing. But more remains to be done, for although we are free by the law, we are not so in practice.”
The letter’s author was Thomas Jefferson. 200 years later, there’s still work to do.
The Jefferson letter is one of 75 objects on view at All We Have Standing Between Us: 250 Years of Jews and American Democracy, the American Jewish Historical Society’s new exhibit at the Center for Jewish History. Arranged in chronological order, from the outbreak of the Revolution to the tiki torches of Charlottesville, the survey takes stock of the at times harmonious but very often discordant, relationship between American Jews and the country, and among themselves.
“One of the throughlines is that for 250 years, American Jews have certainly not been a monolithic community in terms of how they’ve approached key issues,” said Gavriel Rosenfeld, president for the Center for Jewish History.
To that end, visitors can see Shearith Israel’s hazzan Gershom Mendes Seixas’ patriot prayer for the Continental Congress and, a vitrine or two away, a sampler from the loyalist Hendricks family of Psalm 78, whose words were associated with a pro-monarchist sentiment.
Most Jews lived in the Union at the outbreak of the Civil War, but currency with Judah Benjamin’s face, from the Confederate Secretary’s own collection, is proof of just how embedded Southern Jews were in their communities. A telegram nearby, denouncing General Grant’s wartime expulsion order for the Jews of Kentucky, shows how tenuous Jewish belonging was.
The story was never only one of brother against brother. Moving into the 20th Century, with wall text addressing the Gilded Age, we see how American Jews confronted the revival of the Klan and the “Cross of Gold” populism of William Jennings Bryan with the influx of Jews from Eastern Europe. (An explanation of Woodrow Wilson’s veto of a literacy test for immigrants is displayed, as is a scroll inviting well-heeled Jews to a Purim benefit for new arrivals.)
The Anti-Defamation League, a copy of whose founding charter is on display, was formed after the conviction of Leo Frank. But by the 1950s, with the Red Scare gathering storm clouds, the ADL Bulletin dismissed the claim that the Rosenberg trial was animated by antisemitism.
“This is the latest propaganda tactic with which the Communist Party hopes to bludgeon the Jewish community to its support,” Oliver Pilat wrote in March 1952.
Fissures in the community continued with the Civil Rights Movement.
That Jews played an outsized role in the push for Black equality — attested to by Ben Shahn’s lithographs of James Chaney and Northern Jews Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner — is contextualized with the objections of their Southern coreligionists, who feared the blowback of their neighbors.
Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, and Midge Decter savaged it in Commentary. The so-called culture wars that dominate our discourse today are nothing new.
Among the more recent acquisitions are former U.S. Representative Steve Israel’s handwritten notes on a Sept. 13, 2001 FEMA briefing, marking the start of a new American reality. But one is struck by how much remains the same.
A signed photo of Nita Lowey shaking hands with Barack Obama — a Jewish congresswoman and a Black president— was unthinkable in the days of Jefferson and Noah, but their dynamic was not dissimilar from those two men. The intolerance Jefferson wrote about has not abated, only shifted its focus. A Time report on the Unite the Right Rally tells the tale.
The exhibit stops short of the pandemic, Oct. 7 and the emerging rifts among American Jews and their neighbors. That history is still in progress.
“Longer than there’s been a country, there have been Jews,” said Gemma Birnbaum, executive director of the AJHS. At first it was only 23 off the boat to New Amsterdam, she said, but the Jewish story has always been a part of the American one.
Birnbaum and Rosenfeld want visitors to recognize continuities in the unfinished American Revolution, both the progress and the work that remains. Sometimes, this means reassuring visitors. One thing they’re asked a lot: “Does it ever get better?”
“What is better?” Birnbaum asks. “There are times when things are really difficult, and there are times when things feel a little less difficult. And if you can take inspiration from that — to me, I find it grounding.”
The American Jewish Historical Society’s exhibit All We Have Standing Between Us: 250 Years of Jews and American Democracy is on view at the Center for Jewish History through Dec. 31, 2026.
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Diary of a Jewish ghetto refugee, written in a pigsty
אין דער װעלט פֿון ייִדיש איז בערל כּהנס נאָמען גוט באַקאַנט צוליב זײַנע היסטאָרישע און ביבליאָגראַפֿישע שטודיעס, צװישן זײ — דער צוגאָב־באַנד צו דעם „לעקסיקאָן פֿון דער נײַער ייִדישער ליטעראַטור“ און „ייִדישע שטעט, שטעטלעך און דאָרפֿישע ייִשובים אין ליטע ביז 1918“.
אָבער זײַן ערשט בוך איז געװען דער חורבן־טאָגבוך „אַ ייִד אין װאַלד“, װאָס איז אַרױס אין ניו־יאָרק אין 1955. דאָ דערצײלט כּהן װעגן צען חדשים אונטער דער דײַטשישער אָקופּאַציע פֿון ליטע צװישן אָקטאָבער 1943 און אױגוסט 1944. די דאָזיקע צײַט האָט ער, אין אײנעם מיט זיבן אַנדערע פּליטים פֿונעם קאָװנער געטאָ, פֿאַרבראַכט אין אַ באַהעלטעניש טיף אין ליטװישע װעלדער.
איצט, העכער װי 70 יאָר נאָך דער פּובליקאַציע פֿון דעם ייִדישן טאָגבוך, איז עס סוף־כּל־סוף אַרױס אױף ענגליש מיטן טיטל, „אַ ייִד אין וואַלד: זײַטלעך פֿון אַ טאָגבוך“.
פֿאַר דער מלחמה איז כּהן געװען אַן אַקטיװער לינקער ציוניסט און האָט געשריבן פֿאַר קאָװנער ייִדישע צײַטונגען. װען די דײַטשן האָבן פֿאַרכאַפּט די שטאָט, האָט ער זיך געפֿונען אינעם געטאָ אין דער ייִדישער פֿאָרשטאָט סלאַבאָדקע.
„אין דער צװײטער העלפֿט פֿון 1943 זײַנען די אילוזיעס פֿון די פֿאַרשפּאָרטע ייִדן אין סלאַבאָדקער געטאָ אַריבערצולעבן היטלערן געװאָרן אַלץ שװאַכער.“ אַזױ הײבט כּהן אָן די דערצײלונג װעגן זײַן ראַטעװען זיך פֿונעם חורבן.
כּהן, זײַן פֿרױ ראַיע און איר שװעסטער נחמה זײַנען אַנטלאָפֿן פֿונעם געטאָ מיט דער הילף פֿון אַ ליטװישן פּױער טאַדעוש. ער האָט זײ פֿאַרבאַהאַלטן אינעם חזיר־שטאַל בײַ זײַן שטוב אין אַ װײַטן דערפֿל אין מיטן װאַלד.
אין זײַנע נאָטיצן האָט כּהן פֿאַרפֿיקסירט פּרטים פֿון זײער טאָג־טעגלעכן לעבן מיט אַלע דאגות, אַנגסטן און האָפֿענונגען. ער האָט אױך געפּרוּװט צו באַזיניקן דאָס, װאָס עס קומט פֿאָר מיט זײ און מיט אַנדערע ייִדן, כאָטש קײן פֿאַרלאָזלעכע ידיעות פֿון דער ברײטערער װעלט האָט ער ניט געקענט קריגן.
פֿאַרװאָס האָט אַן עלטערער ליטװינער באַשלאָסן צו ראַטעװען ייִדן? טאַדעוש האָט דערקלערט: „איך טו עס ניט דערפֿאַר, װאָס איך װיל פֿאַרדינען געלט. איך בין שױן אַלט – און דאָס געלט אין דער ערד װעל איך סײַ װי ניט מיטנעמען. איך װיל אָבער, אַז ס׳זאָל ניט פֿאַרגאָסן װערן נאָך אומשולדיק בלוט. װאָלט איך געקענט װאָלט איך געראַטעװעט נאָך ייִדן, קען איך עס ניט, װעל איך באַשיצן די, װעמען איך האָב יאָ געראַטעװעט.“
אינעם טאָגבוך ווײַזט כּהן אַרויס אַ סך דרך־ארץ פֿאַר טאַדעוש און זײַן פֿרױ באַרבאַראַ, װאָס שטעלן אײַן זײער לעבן פֿאַר פֿרעמדע מענטשן. ער פֿרעגט זיך: „װיפֿל ייִדן װאָלטן געווען פֿעיִק אַזױנס צו טאָן?“
יעדע מינוט קען װערן די לעצטע פֿאַר די ייִדישע פּליטים אינעם שטאַל. אָבער כּהן איז געװױר אױך פֿונעם שװערן מצבֿ פֿון די ליטװינער: „פֿון דײַטשן װילן זײ פּטור װערן, אָבער דעם רוס װילן זײ אױך ניט האָבן.“
די גרעסטע סכּנה פֿאַר ייִדישע פּליטים קומט טאַקע ניט פֿון די דײַטשן, װאָס באַװײַזן זיך זעלטן אין יענע טיף־באַגראָבענע מקומות, נאָר פֿון די שכנישע פּױערים און פֿון די ליטװישע פּאַרטיזאַנער, װאָס הרגענען ייִדן.
אָבער די מיאוסטע פּאַרשױנען אינעם בוך זײַנען ניט קײן דײַטשן און ניט קײן ליטװינער, נאָר צװײ מיטגלידער פֿון זײער גרופּע — דער „אַמאָליקער פּריץ“ און זײַן פֿרױ. פֿאַר דער מלחמה האָט דער דאָזיקער ייִד געפֿירט געשעפֿטן אין דער געגנט און איצט האַלט ער, אַז די אָרטיקע פּױערים זײַנען אים מחויבֿ צו העלפֿן.
זײַן אַני־מאמין איז געװען „כּל־זמן מע לעבט, דאַרף מען מאַכן געשעפֿטן.“ און ער האָט טאַקע געװאָלט באַקומען רװח אַפֿילו פֿון די פּליטים אינעם אײגענעם שטאַל.
אָבער װאָרעם זײ האָבן ניט געהאַט מיט װאָס צו באַצאָלן, האָט זיך דער פּריץ ניט געטײלט מיט זײ מיטן עסן, װאָס ער האָט געקױפֿט בײַ די פּױערים: „די אַמאָליקע ייִדישע פּריצים עסן פֿאַר אונזערע אױגן פֿלײש און אַלדאָס גוטס – און מיר זיצן און חלומען װעגן אַ שטיקל טרוקן ברױט“, פֿאַרשרײַבט כּהן אינעם טאָגבוך.
אַפֿילו אין יענע ביטערע באַדינגונגען האָט כּהן אָפּגעהיט אַן אײגנאַרטיקן חוש פֿון הומאָר. דאָס קומט פֿאָר למשל אין זײַנע שילדערונגען פֿון די באַציִונגען צװישן ייִדן און דעם חזיר: „אונדזער אײנציקער ׳ניט־ייִדישער׳ שכן אין שײַער איז – דער חזיריוק. אַזױ װי מע קען דאָך ניט פֿיר און צװאַנציק שעה אין מעת־לעת טראַכטן װעגן טױט – קוקט מען גאָר אָפֿט אױפֿן קלײנעם חזיר. די עקלדיקסטע באַשעפֿעניש פֿאַר אַ ייִד […] װאַקסט ברוך־השם פֿון טאָג [צו טאָג].“
מאַקס ראָזענפֿעלדס ענגלישע איבערזעצונג פֿונעם טאָגבוך איז גאַנץ פּינקטלעך און פֿליסיק, אָבער זי גיט ניט איבער דעם אײגנאַרטיקן טעם פֿון כּהנס פּראָזע.
אָט איז אַ משל: אײן טאָג אַנטלױפֿט דער חזיר פֿונעם שטאַל און ייִדן מוזן זיך יאָגן נאָך אים כּדי צו ברענגען אים צוריק. כּהן באַשרײַבט דאָס בזה הלשון: „מיר פֿירן דעם דבֿר־אחר צו זײַן מקום־מקלט“. אָבער אױף ענגליש קלינגט דאָס פּשוט: „we are taking him back to the barn“. דאָ איז ניטאָ קײן שפּור פֿון כּהנס איראָניע, װאָס שטאַמט פֿון זײַן שפּיל מיט לשון־קדוש.
דער חורבן־היסטאָריקער יצחק ארד האָט אָפּגעשאַצט, אַז בערך 25,000 ייִדן זײַנען אַנטלאָפֿן פֿון די געטאָס אין װעלדער בעתן חורבן. אַרום 15,000 פֿון זײ האָבן זיך צוגעשטאַנען צו די סאָװעטישע פּאַרטיזאַנער, בעת 10,000 האָבן געפּרוּװט איבערלעבן אין קלײנע גרופּקעס, אָפֿט מאָל מיט דער הילף פֿון ניט־ייִדישע פּױערים.
די גענױע צאָל פֿון די, װאָס האָבן זיך געראַטעװעט אונטער אַזעלכע ביטערע און געפֿערלרכע באַדינגונגען, װעט מען קײן מאָל ניט װיסן, זאָגט ארד. װאָס איז יאָ זיכער, איז אַז זײער צאָל איז געװען אַ סך קלענער אײדער די צאָל פֿון די, װעמען עס האָט זיך אײַגעגעבן צו אַנטלױפֿן פֿון די געטאָס.
כּהנס טאָגבוך איז ניט נאָר אַ ביז גאָר װיכטיקער היסטאָרישער מקור װעגן דער דאָזיקער דערפֿאַרונג, אָבער אױך אַ מערקװירדיקער מענטשלעכער דאָקומענט און אַ פֿאַרכאַפּנדיקע לעקטור דערצו.
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