Chapter 1: Peace and War. 1911–1929

Fig. 3: Group photograph of the Partners of Warsaw “Central” Publishing Company. R-L: Benjamin Szymin (Binyomin Shimin), Yakov Lidsky, Ben-Avigdor (Avraham Leib Shalkovich), Mordechai Kaplan, Shloyme (Shlomo) Sreberk. Photographer unknown, courtesy of Professor Shlomo Izre'el (grandson of Shlomo Sreberk).

Dawid Szymin was born in Warsaw on November 20, 1911, to a cultivated, intellectual couple, Regina (Rivka), née Segal, born circa 1881 in Maków, and Benjamin Szymin, born circa 1880 in Otwock. His sister, Chaja-Halina (she would later become known as Hala), was three years older than him, and he would keep close ties with her throughout his life. Because of World War II and the subsequent destruction of Warsaw and, therefore, of the Polish Jews' archives, very little is known about Dawid's family and early life.

As part of the Russian Empire before World War I, Warsaw had been flooded with Jewish refugees from the late nineteenth-century pogroms, and as a result, it had the largest Jewish population in Europe—340,000 of Poland's three-and-a-half million Jews. With its thriving intellectual life, the city became the center of publishing in Poland and Russia. The daily and weekly press, the many literary magazines, and other periodicals in Hebrew and Yiddish provided a lively venue for elite writers, poets, scholars, and journalists.

Dawid's father was one of several noted Yiddish and Hebrew publishers who, in 1911, cooperated to form a publishing syndicate named Central (צענטראל, Tsentral; also named in Hebrew: מרכז, “Merkaz”). In addition to Lidski's Progress, Kaplan's HaShakhar, and Sreberk's S. Sreberk (ש. שרעבערק) the syndicate incorporated A. L. Ben Avigdor's (A. L. Shalkovich) pioneering Hebrew publishing company Tushiva (תושיה) and Benjamin Szymin's (ב. שימין) company (figure 3).

Located at Nowolipki 7 in Warsaw, Central was influential, the first Jewish publishing house to establish ties with Jewish communities outside of Russia, including the United States, and distribute its books worldwide. It also owned a bookstore, and the publisher and the store became a magnet for young Polish and Yiddish writers from smaller towns, including Sholem Asch, whose book The Shtetl Szymin published. It published works of the greatest Yiddish and Hebrew writers, historians, and intellectuals; children and young adults' books; textbooks, primers, and manuals, as well as popular calendars depicting paintings of biblical scenes, famous figures, and photographs of Israel; and Passover Haggadot and Shana Tova (Happy New Year) greeting cards. In 1912, Central's subsidiary, Ahisefer, released the literary collection Netivot ('Paths': Free Stage for Matters of Life and Literature), featuring Yiddish translations of European authors such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Tolstoy, Mark Twain, and Guy de Maupassant.1

Passionate about literature, and encouraged by his writer friends such as Sholem Asch, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Sholeim Aleichem, Leon Feiberg, Moshe Mandelman, Oskar Rosenfeld, and Barukh Glazman, Benjamin Szymin dedicated most of his time to Central. A friend of the family remembered: “The Szymin's home was a place where the best Jewish and Hebrew writers of our time met (…) David and his sister Hala were brought up in this atmosphere of idealism and quest for beauty and cultural values.”2 (figure 23 & figure 24)

In the book-lined rooms of the Syzmin's Art Nouveau apartment on Nowolipki Street 23, there were constant comings and goings of visitors, a hubbub of music—the family owned a phonograph and classical records—and literary and political discussion in Yiddish, Polish, or Russian. The family knew Hebrew too. On Shabbat, the fragrant smells of cholent, a stew of meat and barley that had been slow cooking since the previous afternoon, kasha with mushrooms, cinnamon, and chocolate, drifted out of the kitchen while Dawid, who loved to eat and was always hungry, tried to practice scales on the piano.

He loved this bustling family life but what he looked most forward to was the visit of the traveling cinema man who periodically arrived in their yard with his machine. Dawid would spend a few grosze of his pocket money to watch the adventures of the dog Rin Tin Tin who saved a baby left on the rails just before the locomotive arrived, or of Tom Mix chasing bandits on his white wonder horse, Tony. These early images and his frequent visits to the local movie theaters may have triggered his love for images.

On June 28, 1914, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria and his wife in Sarajevo sparked a series of upheavals that rocked Polish Jewry. On August 1, Germany declared war with Russia and World War I began. Warsaw was bombed, and with the rumble of war, Dawid's warm, secure world was to be shattered. Like thousands of Polish Jews, Benjamin and Rivka fled, moving their family to Minsk, in Ukraine, which was linked to Warsaw by the Warsaw-Moscow railway. Benjamin had relatives in Minsk, a flourishing and cosmopolitan city of almost 100,000 people, mostly Jews, but also Poles and Russians, and a smaller group of Belarussians. Minsk had a wealth of theaters, cinemas, newspapers, schools, and colleges, as well as Jewish institutions, societies, and philanthropic organizations, synagogues (almost a hundred, as well as smaller prayer houses), churches, monasteries, and a mosque. A cultural and spiritual hub, it was the cradle of the Litvak (Lithuanian) culture, a tradition that favored rationalist interpretations of Jewish lore over the mystical ones endorsed by Hasidic rabbis. Together with Vilnius, “The Jerusalem of the North,” Minsk was considered a protected place for Jews, and later on was home to exceptional artists, writers, and philosophers such as Jacques Lipchitz, Chaim Soutine, Marc Chagall, and Sergei Eisenstein. Minsk was also an important center for modern Jewish political movements and labor groups such as the Bund, but the political situation was unstable, and in 1916, the Szymin family, like many others, escaped to Odessa, where Szymin had many ties to the business community and where his publishing house was already known. (According to family lore, he left Minsk like a peddler, pushing a cart full of books). “The first winter in Russia was hard and David caught rheumatism, which he suffered from all his life. His legs were very weak,” his sister Hala remembered.3

Chim's brother-in-law Samuel Leib Shneiderman, (later, Emil), Yiddishist, poet, journalist, and writer five years older than Chim, who as a child lived in the small town of Kazimerz Dolny, Poland, vividly remembers the World War I period:

At the time, events of historic significance were taking place in the outside world: the Russian Revolution, February 1917; the British Balfour Declaration, November 1917, with the promise of a Jewish homeland in Palestine; and the rebirth of independent Poland at the close of World War I. These three turning points in modern European history are superimposed upon each other on the screen of my memory as if they had taken place at the same instant.4

He writes about the immediate effect of the Balfour Declaration on the religious community:

The messianic age seemed close at hand (…). He [ the poet Chaim Szendorowicz, speaking during Hanukah services at a local synagogue] said the dream of the return to Zion was about to be realized; it was the duty of every Jew to contribute generously towards this effort. Gold brooches, chains and diamond rings were promptly dropped from the women's gallery, and the men surrendered their gold and silver watches. The large bowls, used on the eve of the Day of Atonement for charitable collections, were quickly filled.5

With the subsequent coming of the Russian Revolution, Odessa was engulfed by civil war. Different factions—Bolsheviks, the Ukrainian Army, and finally the White Russians—fought for control of the city until April 29, 1918, when Odessa became the capital of the Odessa Soviet Republic. The advent of the Soviet regime and the end of World War I marked the end of Odessa as a Jewish cultural center and the home of the Hibbat Zion Zionism movement.

On November 11, 1918, when Dawid was about to turn seven, Poland regained its independence after 123 years of partitions by Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia, The Szymins were finally able to return home, to Warsaw; Central became one of the largest Yiddish language presses in...