In the final year of a career at Trinity College spanning more than five decades, Samuel D. Kassow ’66, Charles H. Northam Professor of History, has again been recognized for his outstanding achievements.
Warsaw Testament, a memoir based on the wartime writings of Rokhl Auerbach—translated, introduced, and annotated by Kassow—has been named a winner of a National Jewish Book Award. Kassow and other recipients of this prestigious award will be honored at a ceremony in New York in March.
Inaugurated in 1950, the National Jewish Book Awards is the longest-running North American awards program of its kind. The awards are intended to recognize authors, and encourage reading, of outstanding English-language books of Jewish interest.
“Congratulations to Professor Kassow, who continues to inspire academic excellence,” said Sonia Cardenas, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty. “We are proud of his impactful work as a teacher, scholar, and mentor to generations of Trinity alumni.”
Published in 2024 by White Goat Press, Warsaw Testament received strong reviews in The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Wall Street Journal, among other outlets. Kassow has been speaking about the book to large audiences during the last several months.
Rokhl Auerbach was a journalist, literary critic, and one of only three surviving members of the Oyneg Shabes, historian Emanuel Ringelblum’s top-secret archive of the Warsaw Ghetto. Upon immigrating to Israel in 1950, she founded the witness testimony division at Yad Vashem and played a foundational role in the development of Holocaust memory. Warsaw Testament, a memoir based on her wartime writings both in the ghetto and on the Aryan side of the occupied city, provides an unmatched portrait of the last days of Warsaw’s Yiddish literary and cultural community—and of Auerbach’s own struggle to survive.
Kassow previously explored the history of the Oyneg Shabes in his book, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Indiana University Press, 2007), which was translated into eight languages and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. One reviewer for the New Republic magazine observed, “This may well be the most important book about history that anyone will ever read.” That book was adapted into a feature film, Who Will Write Our History, which had its world premiere at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival in 2018.
Trinity community members gathered in 2022 to honor Kassow’s 50th anniversary of teaching at Trinity and his world-renowned scholarship on Russian and Jewish history. Kassow will retire from teaching this year after a 53-year career at Trinity.
