If Books Could Talk: The Story of Three Jewish Treasures Rescued from the Vilna Ghetto

What are the secret lives of books? In the Vilna Ghetto, Yiddish poets Abraham Sutzkever and Szmerke Kaczerginski and others risked their lives to rescue Jewish treasures from destruction and looting by the Nazis. David Fishman (Jewish Theological Seminary) selects three of the extraordinary items they saved — Theodor Herzl’s diary, the minute-book from the Vilna Gaon’s synagogue, and an original manuscript of Jacob Gordin’s classic Yiddish play Mirele Efros — and reveals their "biographies": their composition and significance; the story of their acquisition by YIVO; their rescue; and their retrieval after Vilna's liberation. Two of these works were safely transported to YIVO in New York, but the third work encountered a very different fate in Soviet Lithuania.