With this scholarly edition of Yitzhak Katzenelson's complete ghetto writings, the study of Yiddish literary creativity during the Holocaust has made a quantum leap forward. For apart from the brief flurry of activity in the decade following the war when Michel Borwicz, Nachman Blumental and Ber Mark oversaw the publication of a few exemplary works (by Mordecai Gebirtig, Simkhe–Bunem Shayevitsh, Yehoshue Perie and others), this whole extraordinary chapter of Jewish spiritual resistance has been utterly neglected. To be sure, the name of Katzenelson gained wide currency through his monumental dirge Dos lid fun oysgehargetn yidishn folk (The Song of the Murdered Jewish People), which, together with the Ani Ma ‘amin, has taken on liturgical status; but very little was known about Katzenelson's career as the Warsaw ghetto's poet laureate. And so, even if Professor Szeintuch had ‘only’ deciphered and carefully reconstructed the raw texts, he would have added immeasurably to the fund of authentic literary sources from out of the Holocaust proper.

Szeintuch, however, has done much more. Both in his general introduction and in the prefaces to each of the thirty–six works, Szeintuch has thoroughly demystified the Holocaust by making history and biography into the central keys for a proper understanding of its literature. He has . grounded each and every text, no matter how fragmentary, both in the personal events of the author's life and in the facts of the Holocaust as they were made known to Warsaw's Jewish intelligentsia. Where postwar critics with a liturgical slant on the literature of the Holocaust would simply invoke Katzenelsop's ‘prophetic’ powers, Szeintuch insists on checking each motif against the poet's pre–war writing and against all available sources on the ghetto itself, from the Zionist underground press with which Katzenelson was closely affiliated, to the vast body of memoir literature, to unpublished interviews with former members of Dror–Hechalutz. What emerges is a unique portrait of one writer's attempt to adapt – linguistically, psychologically and artistically–to the systematic murder of all that he held dear.

Katzenelson's shift in the ghetto from Hebrew to Yiddish is perhaps the most dramatic evidence of his new self–awareness. He began, not surprisingly, by translating and adapting his own Hebrew works and that of others to the new ghetto reality: visionary poems, biblical dramas, Bialik's ‘Upon the Slaughter’, the prophecies of Ezekiel and Isaiah.