When my wife began research 35 years ago for her book on the history of Yiddish theater, she spent long days at YIVO, the Institute for Jewish Research, at that time still located in the old Vanderbilt mansion at Fifth Avenue and 86th Street. Zosa Sjakowski was an entrenched presence there, a gnome-like man with a talent for instantly alienating almost everyone he came in contact with. But this diminutive bundle of spite had led an adventurous life. He left his native Poland in the 1920s to escape the escalating antisemitism; in Paris he joined the Communist Party and recruited other Eastern European Jews to fight for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War; when World War II began he joined the French Foreign Legion; discharged from the Legion after being injured he made his way to England and joined the American Army as an intelligence officer. On D-Day he was parachuted into Normandy behind the German lines; he was with the first wave of American troops to enter Berlin.
()Szajkowski changed his name (Frydman to Szajkowski ) when he realized that many of the countrymen he was recruiting to fight fascism in Spain were actually being killed not by the forces of General Franco, but by the communists who had taken over the direction of the Loyalists forces; to the Red political commissars, soldiers with different opinions were more of a threat than was Franco. Szajkowski quit the party, but was convinced the communists wanted to kill him, so he changed his name. The fear never left him, never.

The death of Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg this week called to mind a course I took as a Brandeis undergraduate with the legendary YIVO Institute for Jewish Research scholar, Zosa Szajkowski. Szajkowski's idea of teaching was to talk about whatever was on his mind that day, and for a good portion of the course what was on his mind was his ex-friend Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg. Just a few years before, Rabbi Hertzberg's brilliant book entitled ''The French Enlightenment and the Jews'' (1968) had appeared, and Szajkowski charged that much of Rabbi Hertzberg's research was cribbed from his articles. "I am going to sue him," he fumed.
The charge was absurd. Szajkowski, an autodidact whose English was weak, could never have written the powerful thesis-driven book that Rabbi Hertzberg produced. But this did not prevent the two hard-headed ex-friends from having an acrimonious quarrel. Nevertheless, a few years later, when Szajkowski died suddenly, it was Rabbi Hertzberg who conducted his funeral and eulogized him. That was his way.