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New release: Sheymes: A Family Album after the Holocaust, is a memoir by Elizabeth Wajnberg, the daughter of Holocaust survivors who was born in postwar Poland. Evoking the past from the present, she gathers her family’s history as it moves from the prewar years through the war to their arrival in Montreal. In this special guest post, the author shares the background of the word, “sheymes”.
It was a new word for me, too. And not just because I lacked even the rudimentary after-school Hebrew lessons that most of my generation had in Montreal. It is not a common word. One reader thought I made it up, until he asked his rabbi. Pronounced “shay-mes” like “shamus” the detective in American noir novels, it consists of a Hebrew root rendered intimate by Yiddish. “Shem” means “name” in Hebrew. It was one of the brother’s names in Finnegans’ Wake, James Joyce having more Jewish culture than most. But for Jews, “the Name” –“Hashem” – can itself be another name for God.
The “es” at the end of sheymes makes it colloquial, Yiddish, plural; pieces or bits of the Name. Sheymes are pieces of the Torah that remain when the Book gets old and falls apart. They are not to be thrown in the garbage, or burned or casually discarded, because any one of them may bear the Name – the shem – of God. We are supposed to bury them in consecrated ground.
My book is about living sheymes – people who were easily collected as human trash because they belonged to a persecuted minority without a home of their own. It is about all people who will live long enough to become viewed in the same way as those Jews.
I heard the word for the first and only time at a weekend seminar almost two decades ago (December 1995) held by the then fledgling Yiddish Book Center in, of all places, Malibu. Although the Yiddish Book Center was based in Amherst, Massachusetts, its dynamic young founder, Aaron Lansky, had begun the work of saving Yiddish books from the dustbin in Montreal, while he was a student at McGill University. Yiddish remained viable longer in Montreal than in New York, because of the more recent postwar influx of Jews.
The seminar topic was Yiddish Writing in the Nazi Ghettos; most notably the archive of Warsaw Ghetto diaries found buried in the earth in the 1950s long after their writers had been sent to their deaths. These were journals kept by all manner of Jews in the largest ghetto in Europe in the last months, weeks, days before their heroic Uprising against the Nazis that ended in destruction and deportation to Auschwitz. These writings had been part of a project devised by a historian in the ghetto, Emanuel Ringelblum, who asked a cross-section of people each to take a different aspect of life in the ghetto and record it for future readers. The archive was called Oneg Shabbat—Enjoyment of the Sabbath—because the group met on Saturday afternoons. The Warsaw Ghetto, but also the Lodz and the Vilna ghetto also included writers and poets such as Rachel Auerbach, Yitzhak Katzenelson, Simkhe Shayevitsh, Avrom Sutzkever, who synthesized the ancient laments with the present, personal. The group kept writing even as 300,000 Jews were murdered or deported in the summer of 1942, their own members among them. They hid these documents in milk cans in 1942 and 1943 and buried them. A portion of them were dug up by Polish construction workers in 1950.
Many aspects drew me to this workshop — my family of survivors from Poland, my Yiddish mother tongue, its California venue — but the one that got me there was the kinship I felt towards the writing.
I was a writer of – if not diaries – then sketches and letters. My letters from Paris filled up my friends’ attic in Connecticut.
When I got to the children’s summer campsite in Malibu, I was surprised to meet one of the lecturers, David Roskies, a landsman who had attended the same high school in Montreal. He was now a prolific and distinguished Jewish scholar at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. His older sister Ruth Wisse was an even more distinguished scholar who taught at McGill and then Harvard. Here we were, Warsaw/Montreal-in-Malibu.
David’s lecture was titled “The Documentary Imperative.” I don’t have to look it up, I remember it after all these years. At a certain point, he took on the voice of Emmanuel Ringelblum as he exhorted his writers: “Write it down! Write it down NOW in the hot minute, because in the next minute things will get so much worse that you will think what you have lived today is no longer worth writing about!”
This was how I wrote. I wrote as if responding to that order — I wrote out of impulse in the hot minute, in real time, always driven by the sense that if I did not record it then, future events would trivialize or obliterate the present moment. My writing habit, however, did not lend itself to invention, revision, or rewriting. There would never be enough time. The writers in the Warsaw Ghetto kept writing, in real time, to the edge of death.
It was then David said the word. It sounded like shamehs, shemes sheymes. I wrote it down the way I wrote down all Yiddish words, as I heard them phonetically in English. “Shem” meant Name, the “es” made it plural in Yiddish. Sheymes were pieces, scraps, tattered fragments of the Torah which according to Jewish law were not allowed to be discarded or burned, because any one of them could bear the Name — the shem — of God. Any scrap was sacred. When damaged beyond repair, they were not to be tossed away but buried in consecrated ground.
I heard the word only this once, and it was enough.
To learn more about Sheymes, or to order a copy online, click here.
For media requests, please contact Jacqui Davis.
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