Cécile Cerf

Origins and early life

Cécile Cerf was born Cypora Salit at Vilna, now Vilnius, on 12 January 1916, in the Jewish intellectual world of that city — the Jerusalem of Lithuania, where, as her biography puts it, traditionalism and modernism, mysticism and Marxism, Zionism and anti-Zionism lived side by side and argued daily.

Work and career

She came to France and, from 1942, entered the resistance against the German occupation with the Francs-tireurs et partisans: liaison agent, carrier of weapons, and organiser of clandestine printing, which is to say the three most dangerous tasks in the movement, and she was not deported. After the war she was among the founders of the Commission centrale de l'enfance, the body set up by the Jewish immigrant organisations to take charge of the children whose parents had been murdered — some ten thousand orphans in France, who had to be fed, schooled and given somewhere to belong.

She worked afterwards as an administrator and translator for Yiddish literary publications and for the progressive press, keeping in print the language of the world she came from. She died in Paris on 29 December 1973, at fifty-seven.