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Kurt Lewin's essay “Gesetz und Experiment in der Psychologie” of 1927, published in this issue of SiC for the first time in English translation, and his “Der Übergang von der aristotelischen zur galileischen Denkweise in Biologie und Psychologie” (in the English version: The Conflict between Aristotelian and Galilean Modes of Thought in Contemporary Psychology) of 19311 have together contributed most to shape his image as a metatheorist (or philosopher) of psychology. A careful examination of what has occasionally been called the “Lewinian tradition,”2 however, reveals that Lewin's metascientific contributions have been much more influential in Europe than in the United States, where he lived and taught as a Jewish refugee from 1934 until his early death on 2 February, 1947.

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When introducing a collection of essays on Yiddish, Joseph Sherman asserted, among other things, that: Although the Nazi Holocaust effectively destroyed Yiddish together with the Jews of Eastern Europe for whom it was a lingua franca, the Yiddish language, its literature and culture have proven remarkably resilient. Against all odds, Yiddish has survived to become a focus of serious intellectual, artistic and scholarly activity in the sixty-odd years that have passed since the end of World War II. From linguistic and literary research in the leading universities of the world to the dedicated creativity of contemporary novelists and poets in Israel and America, from the adaptation of Yiddish words and phrases to the uses of daily newspapers in English to the elevation of Yiddish as a new loshn koydesh by Hasidic sects, from the publication of new writing to the translation of its established canonical works into modern European languages, Yiddish is continually reminding the world of its vibrancy, relevance and importance as a marker of Jewish identity and survival. (Sherman 2004, 9)

When Emanuel Ringelblum was born on November 21, 1900, in Buczacz, the small, multilingual and multi-ethnic Galician town was to be found on the far northeastern part of the Austrian Empire. As a mail stamp on a Correspondenz-Karte or Karta korrespondencyja of 1890 shows, the place was officially spelled in accordance with its Polish orthography. However, it was called Butschtasch in German, Bichuch in Yiddish, and still differently in Ukranian. After World War I, it was for a short while part of Ukrania, and subsequently became Polish, then Soviet, and Ukranian again in the aftermath of the end of the Soviet Union. Ringelblum's cousin, Shmuel Josef Agnon (1888–1970), was also born in Buczacz. But their lives were to diverge in most respects. Agnon is remembered as one of the leading authors of modern Hebrew belles-lettres who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1966. And one remembers Ringelblum as the one who, with utmost and relentless courage, organized the underground archive Oyneg Shabes in the Warsaw ghetto. Samuel D. Kassow, the expert on the history of Oyneg Shabes and the author of a brilliant monograph on this subject, asserts that “more than anyone else it was Emanuel Ringelblum who encouraged individuals to write, who organized and conceptualized the archive, and who transformed it into a powerful center of civil resistance” (Kassow [2007] 2009, 7).

The publication of a voluminous selection of notebooks from the Vygotsky Family Archive represents a major event for the Vygotsky studies. The material provided in the book turns out to be truly novel; it reaches far beyond mere compilations of existing texts, reprints, and (re-)translations. The key question we address in our contribution is: does this newly made available material have a significant impact on our understanding of Vygotsky’s life and work? We first offer a rough summary of the book’s content, then indicate what readers may expect from the Notebooks and what they will not find there; and finally, we focus on Vygotsky’s early quest for his own Jewishness and on the shift toward systemic and semiotic thinking that marks the last years of his life.