Lisa Moses Leff

Leff’s focus is on an historian who wrote under the name Zosa Szajkowski, who at the same time he was authoring a prodigious number of articles and books on the history of French Jewry, was also systematically pillaging the very archives where he did his research. He was transformed over his lifetime from a leading scholar of French Jewish history who heroically rescues documents, to a thief of manuscripts, selling books and pages he had stolen to academic libraries. Szajkowski was born in 1911 to a poor family in a small town in Poland, moved to Paris when he was 16, and eventually escaped Hitler’s Europe in 1941 by fleeing to the United States. He was a book loving young boy and despite his lack of a formal advanced education, he wrote several groundbreaking studies of Jews in France in the pre and post war era. After his escape to the U.S., Szajkowski returned to Europe as a G.I. In the post-war period, while serving with the occupying forces in Germany, he began a systematic pillaging of documents and materials from Nazi archives and shipping them to YIVO in New York. Suspicions grew about his pilfering and selling documents to major collections in the U.S. and Israel. It was not until 1961 that he was caught red-handed by librarians in France, however, another decade passed before he was finally arrested in New York. In an article written in Jewish Week it was said that “not many books by historians seem like the stuff of feature films’ but Leff’s Archive Thief “seems like a cinematic natural.”… (mere)