Sisters reclaim father’s Yiddish papers

The daughters of a Yiddish writer persecuted under communism reclaimed copies of his works following a prolonged legal fight with a Polish archive.

The letters, newspaper articles and poems by Naftali Herts Kon, whose real name was Jakub Serf, were deposited with the City of Warsaw Archives by communist authorities after he was sentenced to prison on fabricated charges in 1963. After 15 months in confinement, Kon left for Israel, where he died in 1971.

On March 5, his daughters received the papers from archives director Janina Gregorowiczs.

“It is a bittersweet moment, a fantastic feeling,” said Ina Lancman. “I can imagine my father is smiling now.”

In a room at the archives, Lancman, her sister Vita Serf and their lawyer laboriously went through all the papers to make sure everything was there. Some documents were handwritten, but most were typed, with handwritten edits in Yiddish.

Born in what is now Ukraine, Kon spent time in Soviet labor camps for criticizing communism in his writings. In 1959 he arrived in Poland with his wife, Lisa, and daughters and worked as a journalist, reporting from there and Romania about the persecution of political opponents and Jews.

He was arrested in December 1960 on fabricated charges of spying for Israel, which were later downgraded to hostile propaganda. All his works were confiscated in a home search, though a court had never authorized their seizure.

“It is all coming back to me now. The day of the arrest. How they searched through his papers in his room. They could not read Yiddish so they packed everything away. It was all so full of aggression,” Lancman said.

It took them two years of fighting, but in October, a Warsaw court ruled that the writings lawfully belonged to Serf’s family and should be returned. They want to have his writings translated into English and published. — ap