LI woman shares father's Holocaust diary, 'A Jew in the Woods'

People who have known Miriam Lieber as a neighbor in the town of Oceanside, or through her longtime directorship of the Hebrew Academy of Nassau County, "often don't know about my background," says the Long Islander of 50-some years. "Now they're hearing about the book, and coming up to me saying 'I can't wait to read it!' " She pauses for a moment, tears welling up in her eyes.

"You have no idea how thrilled I am that my father's dream, his ambition to make sure that history is not lost — it's happening. It's really coming true."

By "the book," she means "A Jew In the Woods" (White Goat Press, $18.95), a stunning diary her father kept during the Holocaust, published in English for the first time last month. In 1941, as Germany began systematically exterminating the Jewish population of Lithuania, Berl Kagan; his wife, Raja; and her sister, Nechama, were among those rounded up and forced to live in the Kovno ghetto. After two anxious years, they made the difficult decision to stop simply awaiting doom. They left the relative comfort of their home to flee into the countryside where, for 10 months, aided by a sympathetic older Lithuanian couple and others, they lived in the woods and in a barn shared with pigs and a horse.

Throughout this period Kagan wrote daily entries between the lines of two used notebooks he grabbed from an abandoned shop on the way out of town.

He recorded their daily encounters with abject terror, miserable boredom, nearly intolerable hunger and freezing cold. He described the complications they faced with another couple in hiding, wealthy "plutocrats" he calls Mr. and Mrs. F. He wrote of the farm dog who saved their lives innumerable times by barking when strangers approached. He describes the uplifting beauty of a winter forest scene; includes memories of the Shabbos table of his childhood; his thoughts on fear, hope, survival and resistance; and even a poem written by one of the other men in hiding.

"My friend Moyshe, who has just finished his lookout duty, brings me a 'treasure.' Not having anything else to do, he has written a poem. I stare at him incredulously. Since when has he been writing poetry? In normal times he had been as lacking in imagination as a stick of wood.

"I read the first few lines. If I were an editor, it would have gone right into the wastebasket. But how many Yiddish poems were cre­ated in a pig pen?"

And then he copied in the lines of the poem, which describes their hosts as "two old people with the blood of heroes."

If all this make you think of Anne Frank, there's good reason. Like her, then 34-year-old Berl Kagan was a brilliant writer with a gift for simple, affecting prose that transports the reader completely into the lived experience of Jews at that time. Though Kagan was not as hopeful as young Anne about the possibility of survival, his story has a happier ending. The Jews hidden in that barn made it to safety in August 1944.

Miriam Kagan first read her father's diary as a teenager; it had been published in Yiddish in the 1950s to acclaim by the international Jewish community, including the novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer. "But my Yiddish was not so great," Kagan explains, "and I was very young and innocent." After her father's death in 1993, her mother and sister found a translator and made the first attempts at publication in English. They were unsuccessful, but Miriam picked up the thread in 2022.

Miriam had always thought the original diaries were long since discarded, but then realized they might be among the papers she'd donated to an archive at the time of his death. And they were.

"To hold them in my hands," she says,"was surreal."

By this time, Miriam had grasped the full impact of her father's story and his achievement, and was determined to fulfill his dream, contacting publishers big and small — "probably 50 or 60 of them," she remembers ruefully. " 'This is a wonderful diary, but we don't do diaries,' " they would say. It started to seem like it would never happen."

Years ago on vacation, Miriam and her family visited the newly opened offices of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. There she recognized the Burgundy and blue spines of several of her father's self-published scholarly books on the shelf. This memory came back to her and she decided to give it one more try. Soon she was in touch with Lisa Newman, director of publishing, and, as they say, the rest is history.

History preserved in all its terrible and inspiring detail by a brave writer with a used notebook and a pencil.