Translator's Note

In 1932 the Bais Yaakov Journal began advertising Sarah Schenirer's upcoming Collected Writings, which promised to provide an autobiography of her childhood by ‘the founder of the movement herself ‘. Along with this autobiography, the book would also feature a chapter called ‘Pages from My Diary’ with ‘five chapters of interesting descriptions’. When the book was published the following year, however, it contained only the autobiography, now called ‘Pages from My Life’; there was no mention of a diary. But 1955 saw the publication of the first volume of what would eventually be a four-volume Hebrew collection devoted to Sarah Schenirer and Bais Yaakov, A Mother in Israel: The Writings of Sarah Schenirer, the Story of Her Life, Essays, Stories and Plays. The inaugural volume was essentially a Hebrew translation of the Collected Writings, with seven additional essays by such Bais Yaakov leaders as Eliezer Gershon Friedenson, Dr Leo Deutschlander, Yehudah Leib Orlean, and others. Interestingly, this volume also included a section titled ‘From the Diary’, with eleven entries. The preface to the volume relates that the diary was translated from Polish by the Bais Yaakov teacher Bluma Vaytman.

But the story of the diary does not end there. In 2014 a shorter excerpt from Sarah Schenirer's Polish diary was published in Cwiszn, a quarterly magazine on Jewish literature and art. The entries in the published Polish diary largely overlapped with those in the Hebrew translation, with the exception of the last entry, from 12 September (probably 1913). In the last stages of finishing this book, I was also given access to scans of roughly eighty handwritten pages of a Polish diary for the years 1910–13, which were being edited and assembled for publication (some of the pages had become loose, and their order was unclear). I was generously allowed to quote from these pages but was asked not to translate the document until after it had seen Polish publication.