Zosa Szajkowski was born on 10 January 1911, at Zaręby Kościelne (in Yiddish, Zaromb), a small town in Russian Partition, in the region of Białystok.
[6] While supporting himself with various odd jobs, he pursued a career as a writer; by 1934 he was working as a journalist for Naye Prese, Paris's Yiddish-language communist daily.
[11] In The New York Sun,[12] William Meyers gives, in 2007, a portrait of Szajkowski: 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.
The fear never left him, never.Professor Jonathan Sarna[13] from Brandeis University wrote in 2006[14] the following about Zosa Szajkowski: 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, an autodidact whose English was weak, could never have written the powerful thesis-driven book that Rabbi Hertzberg produced.
That was his way.In an article published in 2001, in the Archives juives, on the topic of "La reconstruction de la bibliothèque de l'AIU (Alliance Israélite Universelle), 1945–1955 [The rebuilding of the Library of the AIU (Alliance Israélite Universelle), 1945–1955"], Jean-Claude Kuperminc writes: Before concluding, there remains to mention a particular aspect of these moving operations of the collections of Jewish Libraries.