Lucy Dawidowicz Dead at 76; Famed Holocaust Historian

Lucy Dawidowicz, one of the premier historians of the Holocaust, died in her New York apartment Tuesday night of liver cancer. She was 76 years old.

“I really believe her loss is immeasurable,” said Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, who knew Dawidowicz for 30 years. “She was among the first to teach the history of that tragedy with passion, lucidity and objectivity. Her contribution to the cause of remembrance is incomparable.

“Anyone who from now on will try to acquire knowledge or understanding in that field will remember her with profound affection and admiration.”

In the preface to her best-known work, “The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945,” a classic text of the Holocaust, Dawidowicz wrote, “The Final Solution transcended the bounds of modern historical experience. Never before in modern history had one people made the killing of another the fulfillment of an ideology.”

Author Irving Howe, in a New York Times review on April 20, 1975, called it “a major work of synthesis, providing for the first time a full account of the Holocaust not merely as it completed the Nazi vision but as it affected the Jews of Eastern Europe.”

A personal memoir published last year, “From that Place and Time, A Memoir 1938-1947,” won the National Jewish Book Award for 1990 in the autobiography/memoir category.

PERSONAL ACCOUNT OF PRE-WAR EUROPE

The book was a personal account of pre-Holocaust Europe. From August 1938 to August 1939, Dawidowicz did postgraduate research in Vilna, Lithuania, at the headquarters of the YIVO Institute for Yiddish Research.

“I was one of the last people to see Vilna before the Nazis destroyed the city forever,” she said in a May 1989 interview with Publishers Weekly. “I felt that I had an obligation to put down in words what I had seen and experienced. In doing so, I was able to come to terms with my own life, to exorcise the ghosts of the past.”

Dawidowicz, born Lucy Schildkret in New York on June 16, 1915, was a lifelong Yiddishist. A product of the Sholem Aleichem Institute schools, she was a graduate of Hunter College and received her master’s degree from Columbia University.

Dawidowicz’s parents, Polish immigrants who met in America, raised her in the Bronx and Queens in a non-observant Jewish household, where participation in Jewish holidays was “largely culinary,” she told Publishers Weekly.

While admitting that “the first synagogue I ever set foot in was in Vilna,” Dawidowicz later in life became an observant Jew, keeping a kosher home and attending an Orthodox shul.

Dawidowicz was also the author of “The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe”; “Politics in a Pluralist Democracy,” an analysis of ethnic voting in the 1960 presidential election; co-editor of “For Max Weinreich on his 70th Birthday: Studies in Jewish Languages, Literature and Society”; “The Holocaust Reader”; “The Jewish Presence,” a collection of essays; “On Equal Terms,” a history of America’s Jews; and “The Holocaust and The Historians.”