Zosa Szajkowski (born Yehoshua or Shayke Frydman) (10 January 1911, Zaręby, Poland – 26 September 1978, New York) was an American historian born in Russian Partition of Poland, whose work is important in Jewish Historiography. Biography 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. He spent his childhood there, attending a traditional Jewish cheder, as well as a public Jewish elementary school; later he attended a public Jewish secondary school in Warsaw for three years. In 1927, at the age of 16, Szajkowski moved to Paris, joining two brothers and a sister who were already living there. 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. An autodidact who had never studied at a university, Szajkowski aspired to write scholarly studies in Jewish history. Around 1935 he met Elias Tcherikower and his wife Riva, who were then residing in Paris, and became a regular visitor at their Paris apartment, a gathering place for Yiddish-speaking intellectuals. Over the course of time Tcherikower, who headed the historical section of YIVO, a scholarly Jewish research institute headquartered in Vilnius, became a mentor to Szajkowski in his scholarly endeavors. In 1936 and 1937, Szajkowski published at his own expense two books of his essays on historical topics, one about the history of the Yiddish-speaking immigrant community in France and the other about the history of the Jewish labor movement there. In The New York Sun, William Meyers gives, in 2007, a portrait of Szajkowski: Professor Jonathan Sarna from Brandeis University wrote in 2006 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's idea of teaching was to talk about whatever was on his mind that day, and for a good portion of the course what was on his mind was his ex-friend Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg. Just a few years before, Rabbi Hertzberg's brilliant book entitled The French Enlightenment and the Jews (1968) had appeared, and Szajkowski charged that much of Rabbi Hertzberg's research was cribbed from his articles. "I am going to sue him," he fumed. The charge was absurd.