The Diary of Yitzhak Lamdan

(A Translation)

Translation of Diary 4 (January 1919 – December 1919)

Copyright © 2025-2026 Howard I. Schwartz, PhD

The translation of Lamdan's Diary 4 in 1919 follows below or you can return to the overview, the concise summaries or the interpretive summaries of the diary entries.

Diary 1 (June 1914 - September 1914) | Diary 2 (July 1915 - March 1916) | Diary 3 (November 1916 - May 1917) | Diary 4 (January 1919 - December 1919) (below)

Diary 4 (January – December 1919)

January 1919 (Lutsk)
Background | January 1919 (before the 19th) | January 19, 1919 | January 25, 1919

February 1919 (Lutsk)
February 2, 1919 | February 9, 1919

January 1919

Background to Diary 4

Yitzhak begins writing Diary 4 in Lutsk in January 1919. It is an understatement to say that momentous events in Russia, Ukraine and the wider world had transpired since Diary 3 ended in early May 1917, when he was still living in his father’s apartment in Novohrad Volinskyi: What Yitzhak thought about these events, and how they personally affected him and his family during the intervening year and a half, is not known from contemporaneous diary writing that survives from this period. He may very well have continued writing during this period, but no diary notebooks covering these months are known to survive.

When we left Yitzhak at the end of Diary 3, his brother Moshe had just left for Dubno for his military examination, and Yitzhak himself was preparing to report the next day locally for his own examination.

How Yitzhak fared before the military board, and whether his nearsightedness helped him obtain an exemption or deferment, is not known. In May 1917, the Russian Provisional Government was desperately trying to keep the Eastern Front from collapsing and remained committed to the war. Yet Yitzhak apparently was not sent to the front. Whether this was because of his eyesight, some other physical finding, administrative delay, or simple bureaucratic chaos cannot now be determined.

Nor do we know exactly where Yitzhak spent the following year and a half or when he eventually made his way west to Lutsk. But we can imagine something of the extraordinary sequence of events through which he lived and the way they may have reached a young man already intensely preoccupied with Zionism, socialism, military service, Palestine, and the future of the Jewish people.

If Yitzhak remained in Novohrad Volynskyi during the summer of 1917, he would have found Jewish political life suddenly flourishing around him. The Provisional Government had earlier abolished the old religious and national restrictions against Jews, including those associated with the Pale of Settlement. Zionists, the Bund, Poale Zion, Tse’irei Zion, and other movements were holding meetings, publishing newspapers, and arguing publicly about the future. For Yitzhak, these would hardly have been abstract political questions. At the end of Diary 3 he had been wrestling personally with the claims of socialism and Jewish nationalism. He admired the ideal of human equality, yet rejected the notion that nations should disappear into a colorless internationalism. Now those same arguments were being conducted loudly in the streets, meeting halls, and newspapers around him.

He may even have heard reports from nearby Kyiv, where the Third Russian Poale Zion Congress met in September 1917 and where Ber Borochov, one of the movement’s leading thinkers, spoke about socialism, Zionism, and Palestine. We cannot know whether Yitzhak followed the conference, but its arguments were strikingly relevant to those he had been working through privately in his diary only months earlier.

At the same time another national movement was taking shape around him. In Kyiv, the newly formed Central Rada was demanding autonomy for Ukraine. Yitzhak would likely have encountered Ukrainian political slogans alongside Zionist and socialist ones, all promising some form of national or social renewal after the fall of the tsar.

But the war had not ended. The Russian army’s disastrous summer offensive accelerated the collapse of discipline at the front. Yitzhak may have seen demoralized soldiers moving through the region, heard stories of desertion and disintegration, and wondered what that meant for his own still uncertain military status.

Then, on November 2, came news that electrified Zionists: Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, announcing its support for the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. We do not know when Yitzhak heard this news, but for a young man who long had dreamed of the Land of Israel and had lived through the fall of the Tsarist regime, the news must have revived his hopes and dreams.

Any exhilaration he felt, however, would have been short lived as an increasingly chaotic political landscape unfolded. Only five days after the Balfour Declaration, the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd. They promised to end the war, and negotiations with Germany soon began. By December, fighting on the Eastern Front had largely stopped.

From Yitzhak’s vantage point, however, the situation would not necessarily have looked stable. The new Ukrainian government, the Central Rada, first proclaimed a Ukrainian republic and then, as Bolshevik forces advanced, declared the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UPR) fully independent. In response, Bolshevik troops moved toward Kyiv to suppress the effort. The new Ukrainian government turned to Germany and Austria-Hungary for military assistance and in February 1918 signed a separate peace agreement with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk. German and Austro-Hungarian armies then swept into Ukraine, driving the Bolsheviks back. Within weeks, they advanced across Ukraine reaching Kyiv on March 1st. Meanwhile, the renewed German offensive finally prompted the Bolshevik government to accept the harsh German terms and sign its own Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918. In April 1918, after German and Austro-Hungarian forces had occupied most of Ukraine, they became dissatisfied with the socialist-leaning Central Rada and installed a more conservative government.

Sometime amid these upheavals, Yitzhak made his way west toward Lutsk, not far from his hometown of Mlynov. Perhaps he arrived before the Germans occupied Lutsk in February 1918; perhaps afterward. If he lived there during the German occupation, he may for a time have experienced something that had become increasingly rare since 1914: a measure of order. That stability, too, disappeared. Germany collapsed in November 1918 and its troops began withdrawing. The German-backed Ukrainian government collapsed and by Dec. 1918 the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UPR) had been restored by Ukrainian forces led by Symon Petliura. Ukraine was now descending into a broader civil war, with Ukrainian nationalists, Bolsheviks, White armies, local armed bands, and other forces struggling for control. For the Jewish population, the renewed breakdown of authority brought fear, violence, and growing danger. This was the world into which Yitzhak’s diary suddenly opens again.

[print page 233]

early January 1919, Lutsk

[1] The whip will not awaken them; they don’t observe or pay attention to the condition of the people. On the other side, are accursed and despised traitors, who call themselves “socialists,” for whom one principle from the doctrine of Marx is dearer than the entire life of the people and all its concerns and its sorrows, crumbs crumbs, desolation and destruction, there is no refuge, and when the robber comes to rob and the murderer to kill, he [the attacker] finds a scattered flock before him, one this way and one that way. Before him, he finds people standing and arguing, debating and splitting hairs. One pulls this way and one pulls that way. Yes, in a terrible hour such as this, sitting and discussing futile questions, arguing and discussing the Marx doctrine – and all around ruins and destruction, the whip lashes, the bullets fly towards the Jewish heart, and these people stand and proclaim: how fine, how fitting, this is the way of socialism, this is revolution, all around screams of savages thirsting for blood, but only for Jewish blood, and here a base and contemptible groveling before the socialist idol, as it were—that idol on whose account these troubles have come upon us: How low, how astonishingly low this people has fallen! […] […] the face of this land. Is there hope? Is there […] […] very – and the troubles are frequent and come suddenly […] [2] and the heart so yearns for the East^[1a] [i.e., the Land of Israel], for that one corner of the world, where you can feel like a man of worth, as a man among men, and not like a sheep among wolves or a fly in coarse hands …. The situation is terrible. The air is entirely saturated with terror born of fear and dread.

Read the interpretive summary or return to the top of the page.

[1] The outer doubled pages, which envelop this diary notebook from both sides, are missing. One or two pages are missing from the beginning and end. ↩

[1a] [Translator’s comment:] Though Palestine/the Land of Israel lies roughly south-southeast of Yitzhak in Ukraine, he describes the heart as longing for “the East.” Whether consciously or not, his language here echoes with a famous line by the poet Yehuda Halevi, which Yitzhak knew and quoted in his diary on August 23, 1914: “My heart is in the East, while I am at the far end of the West.” There Yitzhak glossed the quotation: “These words from our ancient poet, the first Zionist, pour out from all my limbs.” He had also alluded to the poem in his entry of July 16, 1914. Halevi was writing from Spain, for whom the Land of Israel lay to the east. [HS] ↩

[January 19, 1919] Sunday night, 19th of Shevat, 5679. Lutsk

Today was a difficult day. I didn’t even step outside my room. While still morning they came and reported that in the city the soldiers^[1b] were seizing every Jew they met in the streets for labor. I decided not to take a risk by going out given the exigencies of the hour. The general mood was awful. The whole city seemed dead. All the stores were closed. They imposed a substantial sum of money as a military tax^[2] on the city and threatened that if the sum was not brought in by appointed time, they would kill the heads of Jewish community. And everything falls only on the Jews, upon the Jews. This has a terribly depressing effect on the soul. You feel your nothingness, your invisibility, your insignificance among such beasts of prey. […] with fear and with trembling. I was extremely agitated all day. […] All day long, I stayed in the house, and I did nothing, not […]^[3]

Read the interpretive summary or return to the top of the page.

[1b] [Translator’s comment:] Probably Ukrainian troops belonging to the forces of the Ukrainian People’s Republic: detachments under Symon Petliura had entered Lutsk on December 20, 1918. See interpretive summary. For background on the Ukrainian nationalist efforts in the period, see Serhy Yekelchyk, Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation, especially chapter 4. See also the useful “Ukraine in the Flames: 1917 in Kyiv" by Serhii Plokhii. https://www.huri.harvard.edu/news/ukraine-flames-1917-kyiv-serhii-plokhii Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.[HS] ↩

[2] The word “contributzia” [written in Hebrew lettering] (from Latin: contribution) refers to a tax imposed during time of war. The events described here were tied to the period before Lutsk was transferred to Poland from the 16th of May 1919. Until this date, the city was in a situation of anarchy and under the military governance of the White army and Lamdan describes fear of it in this diary. [Translator’s comment:] Sources indicate that troops under Symon Petliura entered Lutsk on December 20, 1918. At the time of this entry, the city was therefore under forces of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, governed by the Directory, rather than the White Army. Polish troops occupied Lutsk on May 16, 1919. [HS] ↩

[3] The last line of this page is unclear and not readable. ↩

[January 25, 1919] Saturday night (“motzei Shabbat”) 24 Tevet [should be 25th of Shevat],^[3a] 5679. Lutsk

Difficult days have arrived. You live [through] days of fear and terror in an atmosphere saturated with explosive material as on a volcano ready to erupt at any moment. The Jew especially feels so downtrodden, so worthless, who protect him? Who will stand up for him? He is the target of all the arrows and murderous hands on all sides. With every change, with every changeover^[3b] - he is the [scape] goat for Azazel; he constantly finds himself in the situation of “the pot fell on the stone—woe to the pot; the stone fell on the pot—woe to the pot.”^[4] This difficult situation produces terrible nervous agitation; your life is no life; you don’t live by your will, but rather by chance; you constantly gaze outside but all your paths outside are cut off, you don’t decide your own fate. You can’t fashion it; foreigners rule you, they will do to you as they deem fit. Oh, your people is but a flock, a scattered people, a nation of gibberish and chatter,^[5] but you are sevenfold more wretched, because even in your inner camp there is no peace, no discipline, no order, every man [retreats] to his own tent and his own concerns. “Not a people, not a community, just a flock.”^[6]

My condition recently, because of the prevailing moods is […] very. Grief … fear rules over everyone. I can’t focus on any matter. I am even unable to read. [4] I read lightweight things that have the ability to delight the imagination, to distract it from reality for several moments, like a baby that they want to distract from his crying and they placate him with various toys. For a moment he pays attention to them – but immediately he returns to his crying … I also began to write new things – but the writing comes to me with difficulty... even though the creative power flows, still it is hard to concentrate my thoughts, which are scattered by nervous agitation, with not a moment of complete peace, without which it is impossible to create anything…

In addition to everything else, I experience a new stinging sorrow; I worry about the wellbeing of my dear brother Moshe and the entire family of Heni, my sister, since they are living in Ekaterinoslav.^[7] A few weeks ago, the city was conquered [print page 235] by the “Bolsheviks” who perpetrated a terrible slaughter there.^[7a] Reports indicate a great many killed intentionally and unintentionally, of fires and conflagrations, and already the city has been conquered a second time for Ukraine, and […]^[8] already […]^[9] was completely established [?] between Ekaterinoslav and the entire surrounding area, but I […] what thoughts and brooding … and this matter is so very distressing, terrifying. There are moments when I am truly horrified by thoughts such as these.

Read the interpretive summary or return to the top of the page.

The entry is dated Saturday night (“motzei Shabbat”) the 24th of Tevet (should have been Shevat). The 24th is Friday night, not "motzei Shabbat." [HS] ↩

[3b] [Translator’s comment:] It is possible Yitzhak is referring here to the changes of political authority in this period. For example, between March 1917 and February 1919, Kyiv had ten different governments. See Abrams, Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, p. 78. [HS] ↩

[4] Quoting Esther Rabba 7: A stone fell on a pot, Ow! to the pot. A pot fell on a stone, Ow to the pot. Whether this or that, Ow to the pot.” [Translator’s comment:] Yitzhak uses a similar metaphor about a pitcher and a stone in earlier diaries. See entries for Aug. 23, and Sept. 11, 1914. [HS] ↩

[5] Based on Isaiah 18:2: “Go, swift messengers, to a nation far and remote, to a people thrust forth and away, a nation of gibberish and chatter, whose land is cut off by streams.” ↩

[6] Based on the poem of Yehuda Leib Gordon, “The Lord’s Flock:” “Let me reveal this secret to you quietly, but do not take slander from the room: We are not a people, not a community, but only a flock.” Collected Poems of Yehuda Leib Gordon, Warsaw. Ha-Sefirah Press, 5665 [1904-1905], vol. 1, book 2, Shirei Higayon, no. 34. This line from his poem was also quoted by A. D. Gordon in his essay, “On Valuing Ourselves.” Aaron David Gordon, Selected Writings, Jerusalem: The Zionist Library of the World Zionist Organization, chap. 12, pp. 225-26. ↩

[7] Heni, his oldest sister, is mentioned twice before this (Jan. 30, 1917) as living with her family in Baranivka. Ekaterinoslav is the 3rd largest in Ukraine, located on the banks of the Dnipro, about 860 km southeast of Lutsk, where Lamdan is staying. Starting in 1926 its name became Dniepropetrovsk. [Translator’s comment:] Actually Heni is mentioned multiple times in Diary 3 when Yitzhak was staying in her home in Baranivka before and after his mother passed (see for example, Diary 3: Nov. 13, 22, 27, 1916). [HS] ↩

[7a] [Translator’s comment:] Yitzhak is likely referring to the fighting in Ekaterinoslav beginning on December 27, 1918, when Nestor Makhno’s insurgent forces, aided by local Bolshevik workers’ detachments, attacked and captured the city from forces loyal to the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UPR). After several days of fighting, UPR forces counterattacked and retook Ekaterinoslav around December 31–January 1. During the Makhnovist retreat, many insurgents were reportedly killed or drowned while attempting to cross the Dnieper. Earlier in 1918, German and Austro-Hungarian forces had occupied Ukraine following the UPR’s treaty with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk; their withdrawal late that year helped reopen the struggle for control of the city. See “The Anarchism of Nestor Makhno: 1918-1921.” The Anarchist Library. Sept. 20, 2026. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/michael-palij-the-anarchism-of-nestor-makhno-1918-1921#toc12 ↩

[8] Five words are blurry and are unreadable. ↩

[9] Three words are unreadable. ↩

February 1919

[February 2, 1919] Sunday night (lel yom bet) 3rd of [ the month of] Adar I,^[9a] 5679. Lutsk

Complete apathy. Loss of resolve over everything. It has been more than two weeks during which I didn’t write in my diary. At times I wanted to write but my spiritual weakness was so great that I felt myself helpless even to make a simple entry. I am ashamed of my sorrow, sorrow of my insignificance and helplessness… the external events, the situation of this period, the constant fear, the disturbing rumors – are killing all personal feeling, all spiritual originality, all internal thought, and you become so totally enslaved to the external force that you tremble before it like the as the leaf trembles^[9b] before the storm… all your genius, all your worlds, all the spinnings of your imagination are ruined and finished in a single instant because of the blowing of the wind from the outside… I am embarrassed, I am ashamed by my sorrow: Why all the toil? Why all the games of the imagination, why all the fake weeping (or more correctly which is revealed to be fake…) If all this cannot stand up to every external wind?... And this painful recognition has introduced a severe storm in my life… and I don’t know rest, and this causes a spiritual apathy, an internal laziness, despair, a view that all toil is in vain, and there is no possibility to write, to read, to devote oneself to anything. The ears are tuned constantly to the outside, listening… the eyes are tuned [...] how awful a heart filled with grief like this, and how despicable [...]

Last week I received a letter from Mlynov from my dear family members, together with a letter from Moshe that had been received there several weeks ago after the known tumult in Ekaterinoslav. This letter calmed me down. All of them, thank God, left safe and sound from the terrible destruction that took place there by a group of murderers and robbers that called themselves "Bolsheviks."^[9c] But now I fear and worry again about their wellbeing, because apparently Ekaterinoslav is now in the control of the Bolsheviks - quite unpleasant…

Read the interpretive summary or return to the top of the page.

[9a] [Translator’s comment:] In some years, the Jewish calendar adds a leap month – a second month of Adar – to align the lunar calendar back to the solar seasons. In those years, there is an Adar I and an Adar II. The leap years occur in 7 years out of a 19-year cycle. [HS] ↩

[9b] Yitzhak’s comparison of himself to the “trembling of a leaf before the storm” echoes linguistically with the biblical idiom of “a driven leaf,” (‘aleh nidaf), which appears in Leviticus 26:36 and in Job 13:25. The Job verse is closer to the way Yitzhak uses the expression here. There Job asks God, “Will you harass a driven leaf…” In Leviticus, God warns the Israelites that “the sound of a driven leaf shall put them to flight.” Nineteenth century Hebrew writers were adapting the image into similes for a person trembling in fear, for example Smolenskin (“like a driven leaf, all his bones trembled”). Lamdan’s “as the leaf trembles before the storm” elaborates what is already an established literary image. ↩

[9c] [Translator’s comment:] See note [7a] for the earlier fighting over Ekaterinoslav. Here Yitzhak has already learned of the renewed Soviet offensive: Bolshevik forces recaptured Ekaterinoslav from the Ukrainian People’s Republic in late January 1919. His comment indicates that he understood the city to be back under Bolshevik control by the time he wrote this entry on February 2. [HS] ↩

[February 9, 1919] Sunday night (lel yom bet), 10th of Adar I, 5679, Lutsk

The intense sorrow coming from the outside, so responsible for the weakness of my inner emotional state, is the reason I have been writing less in recent days; the anguish and powerlessness are so great … and in general, life is so [….] devoid of interest. Everything has been sickening and burdensome; I was fed up with my teaching work and [“] to the evening I will say ‘if only it were morning’ and to morning [I will say] if only it were evening.[”] […]^[10] though I want to fulfill my obligation […]^[11] rose greatly and I pass these hours […]^[12] in emptiness and desolation, vague fear rules constantly […] recent [days?], we live in some thick fog […]^[13] nothing, and this lack of knowledge is so upsetting [7] and especially painful is the realization that none of these matters are leading to anything good; on the contrary, all the events are developing such that the future will be seven times harder than the present. And there is no satisfaction. No life nor enjoyment of life, no life [derived] from independent thought and self-esteem, personal feeling, inner originality have been completely lost due to the strong exterior winds that blow and stir up suffocation and stench… difficult, difficult… and during these difficult days, only occasionally, at rare intervals, do isolated glimmers of light shine forth; these moments are few, these moments of creation, only when I sit and engage in creativity, namely: only in the moment that the spirit of creativity visits me, and I am devoted to it then I forget everything. And my whole being withdraws into it, but these moments after all do not last, and after them – gloom returns, desolation, mourning and grief in everything – there is no shelter, no refuge, and no place towards which the heart is drawn and the soul will pray…

Read the interpretive summary or return to the top of the page.

[10] Quoting the words of the curse in the book of Deuteronomy 28: 67: “In the morning you shall say, ‘If only it were evening!’ and in the evening you shall say, ‘If only it were morning!’—because of what your heart shall dread and your eyes shall see.” [Translator’s comment:] This verse appears within a lengthy series of curses that will befall the Israelites if they do not remain faithful to God’s instruction. Yitzhak clearly identifies with the condition of fear and dread described in the verse, and he may also be seeing his own circumstances as echoing the broader fate of Israel portrayed in this passage. Whether he understood the suffering of Jews in his own time as divine punishment, however, he does not say. [HS] ↩

[11] Several words are blurred. ↩

[12] Several words are blurred. ↩

[13] Several words are blurred. ↩

[14] Several words are blurred. ↩

Translated by Howard I. Schwartz
Updated: March 2026
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