As a result of his growing knowledge of the harsh realities of the Holocaust and World War II, following the war, Franklin Littell went to work in the Religious Affairs branch of the Office of Military Government in U.S. occupied Germany. He served as a religious advisor to the U.S. Government, specializing in Germany’s protestant churches, and he was also a leader in the growing Christian lay movement there (more on those activities later). As a result of his work and position, from time to time he was afforded the opportunity to travel into Soviet-occupied Germany. The following are portions of a letter written home about his experience the first time he made this journey in 1949.

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Courtney Smerz, Project Archivist

Franklin H. Littell was Temple faculty member and scholar of religious history, whose focus lay in the history of sects and of Christian/Jewish relations.  He also brought world-wide attention to the importance of studying the Holocaust and its causes, and a large percentage of the more than 400 linear feet of papers (think the equivalent of 50 four-drawer filing cabinets) document that work.  This is one of the occasional posts about what we’re finding as we preserve and organize the collection for research use.

Chremslach are fried pancakes or fritters typically made from matzoh meal. Recipes for Chremslach can be seen in various cultures dating back to the Roman Empire, but it is the Ashkenazi Jews who have adopted this sweet pancake as a tradition during Passover. Versions of this fried pancake vary from those dressed with fruit preserves or dipped in honey to fritters stuffed with fruits and nuts and sprinkled with powdered or cinnamon sugar.

One of the earliest recorded recipes for Pesach Chremslach can be found in Esther Levy’s Jewish Cookery Book on Principles of Economy Adapted for Jewish Housekeepers with the Addition of Many Useful Medicinal Recipes and Other Valuable Information Relative to Housekeeping and Domestic Management, published in 1871. Considered to be the first Jewish cookbook published in America, Levy’s book is both a collection of recipes and a manual of instruction on the day-to-day management of a 19th-century Jewish household. The Jewish Cookery Book includes explanations for setting a table, menu planning, and recommendations for cooking with seasonal ingredients. Among Levy’s recipes, suitable for preparation during Passover is a recipe for Grimslechs that incorporates apples, currants, raisins, and almonds into the batter before frying or baking.

Check out Esther Levy’s recipe for Chremslach:

Chop up half a pound of stoned raisins and almonds, with half a dozen apples and half a pound of currants, half a pound of brown sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, half a pound of fat, the rind of a lemon, two soaked matzas or unleavened bread; mix all the ingredients together with four well beaten eggs; do not stiffen too much with the matzo meal; make into oval shapes; either fry in fat, or bake in an oven a light brown.

Access the catalog record to Esther Levy’s Jewish Cookery Book in the online library catalog

–Jessica Lydon, Associate Archivist

Read a transcription of this letter.

Neither Franklin Littell nor his brother, Wallace, fought in World War II (though both would later participate in the rebuilding of Germany, during the American Occupation). Instead, Franklin completed his education at Yale, and Wallace registered as a conscientious objector.
As a CO, Wallace—“Pickle,” for short—considered many options for service. While awaiting acceptance into the Civilian Public Service, he explored working abroad with the American Friends Service Committee as well as programs at Haverford and Swarthmore Colleges. He spent time in Philadelphia working at the Friends Neighborhood Guild, while also looking for work as an ambulance driver. Leaving Philadelphia, he hitchhiked across the US, making many stops, including several National Parks and to work as a farm hand in Montana. He eventually made his way to a Civilian Public Service camp in South Dakota. Moving between CPS camps out west, he worked as a “smoke jumper,” parachuting out of airplanes to extinguish forest fires.
There are many letters from Wallace in the collection, chronicling his experiences as a CO as well as his later work in the Foreign Service. The letter pictured here was written in April 1943, before he was accepted to the Civilian Public Service. In it, he discusses some of his options for government sanctioned alternative service work during the war.

–Courtney Smerz, Project Archivist

In 1907, three Philadelphia natives opened Camp Kennebec, a summer camp for boys that reflected the robust masculinity and rugged independence of the Teddy Roosevelt era. Situated on Salmon Lake in North Belgrade, Maine, Camp Kennebec provided a means of recreation in the natural environment juxtaposed with the campers’ urban life in Northeastern and Mid-Western cities. Kennebec, opened during the pioneer days of organized camping, was dedicated to keeping the camping experience as natural and primitive as possible and promoting healthy competition through athletics and wilderness activities.

By the 1930s, Camp Kennebec had instituted camping trips to various outposts throughout the Maine wilderness. A mainstay of the Kennebec experience, these expeditions gave campers the opportunity to explore the landscape and test their skills. Among the campers of the 1938 camp season was Edward Block, described camera fiend and resident photographer. While at Kennebec, Block used photography to document his experiences and record activities including the annual trip to Mt. Katahdin, the highest mountain in Maine and the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail. Over the course of the nine day expedition, Edward Block recorded the progress of their ascent to the summit and captured the natural beauty of Maine’s pristine environment.

A collection documenting Philadelphia campers’ time at the camp is now available for research in the Philadelphia Jewish Archives collections of the Special Collections Research Center.  Start by reviewing the finding aid at http://library.temple.edu/collections/scrc/camp-kennebec-alumni.

Frances W. Kratzok recently donated a 1935 diary written by her father, Stanton W. Kratzok to the Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center.

Stanton Kratzok was a Philadelphia native and alumnus of Temple’s School of Law. He composed the diary in the summer of 1935 during his travels abroad through Europe and the Soviet Union. That summer, Kratzok, an undergraduate at Wharton, enrolled in a program hosted by Moscow State University and organized by the Institute of International Education in New York and Intourist, the official state travel agency of the Soviet Union. It was during his journey to Moscow that he recorded his thoughts and experiences with the aid of a portable Remington typewriter.

Upon arriving in Leningrad, Kratzok and the caravan of American and English students travelling with him were informed the People’s Commissariat for Education had cancelled the summer program, purporting the professors assigned to instruct the courses had been commandeered by the government for “shock work.” Accommodations were made for Kratzok and his fellow travelers to tour the Soviet Union in lieu of their planned studies. Nearly half of the diary’s contents are dedicated to his exploration of Moscow, the seaside towns in Georgia, and the cities of Yalta and Kiev in the Ukraine. Within the 82 pages of the diary, Kratzok provides colorful commentary about his fellow travelers, the sites he visited, social conditions, and government politics with special attention paid to the legal system in the Soviet Union and daily life for Russian Jews.

The finding aid for Stanton W. Kratzok’s diary is accessible online. 

–Jessica Lydon, Project Archivist

Franklin Littell grew up to be a prolific writer of religious history, but he may have gotten his start writing science fiction.  When he was just 11 years old (circa 1928), he wrote “A Trip to Mars.”  In this story, a young student of astronomy named Jim journeys to Mars with his professor.  They travel in a ship invented and built by the professor that went “one hundred thousand miles an hour, forward, and one hundred thousand five hundred miles an hour, perpendicularly…” In the story, Littell describes a ship that was “run by five engines, of eight thousand horsepower each….  It had one pair of wings…,” was equipped with “fifty large oxygen tanks…,” and ran on “a new kind of gasoline that will make the plane go one thousand miles per gallon.”

Littell describes their arrival on Mars as experienced by his character Jim: “…under the plane some of the boldest men of mars, were preparing to fight…”.  Jim and the professor landed the ship and disembarked when “suddenly the chief [Martian] yelled and started for the man [the professor].  They [Jim and the professor] put up a desperate fight, but were outnumbered.  It was their [the Martians’] custom to poke their spears into their victims before they burned them…” .  Page 6 of the manuscript tells us what happens next.

Read a transcript of this story page.

Littell’s short story is creative and fun and a definite foreshadow to his future life as a writer, but it also unexpectedly links the Littell papers to another collection acquired by the Special Collections Research Center in 2010, the manuscript and illustrations for Peter Caledon Cameron’s Nodnol (circa 1900).  Part of Temple’s Science Fiction and Fantasy collection, this manuscript takes the reader on an expedition to the Antarctic, where among other things, a new race of people are discovered.  The people found inhabiting the South Pole prove to be far less aggressive than those encountered on Mars by Littell’s Jim and the professor, but both stories speak to the early 20^th century’s fascination with discovery and encountering new worlds.  By the time Littell wrote, the race to the South Pole was over and space was beginning to take shape as the newest, unexplored frontier.

“Nodnol. The narrative of a Voyage for scientific investigation into the Antarctic Regions, the discovery of Astrogee, a Second Satellite or New World, resting on the South Pole of Our Earth, its exploration, its strange fauna and flora, its marvellous [sic] natural phenomena, its wonderful nations of civilized Quadrumana and its glorious population of perfect Humanity.” 279 pages, annotated and edited by the author, with a separate portfolio of seventeen signed illustrations in pen and ink.

Purchased in May 2010 for the  SCRC’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Collection, the Nodnol manuscript was written and illustrated by the English-American water-colorist Peter Caledon Cameron (active in the U.S., coming from England, 1880s-1930s?; Philadelphia/New Jersey area) and is typical of 19th and early 20th century fantasy and science fiction writing and illustrating.

–Courtney Smerz, Project Archivist