An Aid Worker in a Time of Pogrom, Chaos, and Anguish
During the Russian Civil War

July 16, 2023 – Michael Nutkiewicz translated and expanded Eli Gumener’s Yiddish memoir, originally published in Lithuania in 1921. Entitled A Ukrainian Chapter. A Jewish Aid Worker’s Memoir of Sorrow, the memoir depicts the fate of Jewish communities caught in the middle of the Russian Civil War and the challenges of providing relief to Jewish communities. Gumener (1886-1941) was Michael Nutkiewicz’s uncle and worked for major aid organizations between World War I and World War II. Michael was unaware of his story until he discovered the book in his parents’ vast Yiddish library after they passed away. Gumener’s memoir is a highly valuable and rare historical source that focuses on the two most devastating years of pogroms in Ukraine, 1918-1920. Eli Gumener lived a courageous and vulnerable life during and after the Civil War, providing aid to victims but finally becoming a victim himself twenty years later in the Holocaust.

Michael Nutkiewicz earned his Ph.D. in History from UCLA. He taught at the University of Missouri-Columbia and the University of New Mexico. In addition to his university teaching, Michael served as Director of The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, Senior Historian at the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Executive Director of the Program for Torture Victims in Los Angeles, and manager of the refugee resettlement program at Catholic Charities-New Mexico. He has published in the areas of Jewish history, early modern Europe, the uses of oral testimony, and social justice education. Michael’s annotated translation of Eli Gumener’s 1921 Yiddish memoir was published by Slavica Publishers in October 2022.