Plagued by my usual cast of physical ailments, I journeyed in classic stony-faced fashion, and I can only be grateful to my compatriots for not throwing me out of the bus. That being said, along the way, I learned quite a lot about Jews, memory, and language in Eastern Europe. If you'll indulge me, I'll impart a bit of what I learned, followed by more personal remarks and pictures.
Growing up several generations removed from WWII, I think I always took the existence of Holocaust museums for granted. Earlier generations had established the necessity for Holocaust remembrance and the basic forms in which it took place. Beginning in elementary school (I was 12 when Schindler's List came out in 1993), I saw my task differently: to analyze and critique the way the Holocaust was presented to me.
It seemed to me, as I grew older, that American Jews received their information about Jewish life and history in Eastern Europe from two institutions in particular: March of the Living and Yad Vashem. March of the Living, a nonprofit organization with both American and Israeli funding (www.motl.org), has taken generations of Jewish high school students to Poland and Israel, beginning with tours of the Polish death camps and ending with the celebration of Yom Ha'atzmaut, Israeli independence day. The message is clear: Jewish suffering in Eastern Europe has ended, in a deterministic fashion, in the victory of Zionism and the creation of the state of Israel. Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, similarly emphasizes the history of Zionism and Hebrew-speaking Jews in Eastern Europe over other political and linguistic groupings and ideologies. Jewish life and culture in Eastern Europe is reduced to the Holocaust; the Holocaust in turn becomes Israel's founding myth.
Yad Vashem's approach towards collecting artifacts was illustrated clearly in 2001. Frescoes painted by Bruno Schulz under duress during the Second World War had been discovered in his native town of Drohobych, in Ukraine. Yad Vashem removed some of the frescoes, bringing them back (illegally) to Israel for conservation. Several prominent Polish and East European historians published an open letter to the New York Review of Books in protest: "The work of Bruno Schulz, after all, reminds us that this region was long one of unique cultural richness and diversity; an effort by any single group to monopolize his memory erases this history of pluralism."
Historians have increasingly begun to frame the experience of Jews during the Second World War within a larger framework. My advisor and mentor Timothy Snyder (Bloodlands, 2010) has situated the Holocaust within the larger context of violence and terror in the region beginning in the early 1930s. Our focus should not be limited to Auschwitz and other death camps but rather should include the crude shooting that killed the majority of Jews.
A new Museum of Polish Jewry (http://www.jewishmuseum.org.pl/pl/cms/strona-glowna/), scheduled to open in Warsaw in 2013, has made its mission not to be a Holocaust museum but rather to offer a history of 1000 years of Jewish life in Poland. Its organizers propose to devote equal attention to secular Jews as well as religious ones; to tell a story of Polish-Jewish relations while attempting not to prioritize either the Polish or Jewish narratives.
It is not always clear, however, how exactly Jews should be remembered; the extent to which remnants of Jewish life should be conserved, or, alternately, reconstructed; and, in a region where virtually no Jews remain, who should be doing the remembering.
Funding is always an issue. Thanks to the (financial) influence of Chabad, as well as other organizations such as the Lauder Foundation (http://www.lauderfoundation.com/), Judaism in Poland today has been largely understood, interpreted and practiced as a religion, rather than as a culture or historical tradition. Those who do not wish to keep shabbat or kashrut, or those who are not biologically Jewish, are either consciously or de facto excluded from the community (and from funding). The rabbinic establishment has embraced events such as concert tours of the American Hasidic singer Matisyahu; there is little communal framework or support for those who might question his lyrics or find them offensive.
Then there is the national question. In the interwar period, the eastern border of Poland lay far east of its present location, so that Poland extended far into present-day Ukraine. This presents a complication for remembering those Jews who identified as Poles yet lived in what is today Ukraine. The Ukrainian government, plagued by corruption, has little funding for public works of any sort--and there is clearly little interest in funding the memorialization of either Poles or Jews. Support for extreme forms of Ukrainian nationalism in western Ukraine in particular makes public self-reckoning or self-criticism out of the question. (There are of course exceptions, see for ex.: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/06/world/europe/06priest.html). Poland has been discussing the heated question of Polish-Jewish relations for ten years, since the 2001 publication of Jan Gross' Neighbors (Sąsiedzi), an account of Polish violence against Jews during WWII. In Ukraine, there has been virtually no such public discussion. As the director of Lviv's Center for Urban History put it, "these things are still very painful."
Indeed, there are fundamental differences between Poland and Ukraine (even though they are jointly sponsoring the Euro 2012 soccer tournament). Poland joined the EU in 2004, and European funds have led to visible improvements in over the past couple of years, for example in transportation. In Ukraine, renovations in preparation for the Euro 2012 are rather potemkinish: a facade for collapsing infrastructure. Poland has been active in promoting democracy in the region since the collapse of the Soviet Union; civil society in Ukraine is still circumscribed.
Our opinions of Ukraine were shaped by a bad experience on our first night: a restaurant that commercialized Jewish memory to the point of being anti-Semitic. Patrons are invited to sit out on an open-aired veranda overlooking the ruins of an old synagogue. The walls are festooned with Bruno Schulz sketches, and a television screen flashes photos of Hasidic men in interwar Poland; Jewish ritual objects; and coins of some sort (presumably shekels?). Guests are invited to take part in the Jewish ritual of hand-washing before meals (so strange in this context that I couldn't keep a straight face).
Matzah is served instead of bread--a stereotype with a concerning resemblance to the old pretext for pogroms against Jews. Finally, the meal ends with the 'traditional' Jewish custom of haggling over the bill with the waiter (!!!!). In our case, it turned into a disturbing debate over Jewish vs. Ukrainian victimhood.
*****
Whether in Poland or Ukraine, there is a thin line between memory and kitsch, so that outside observers familiar with Polish language and culture differ on what is appropriate or, alternately, offensive.
In the city of Lublin (eastern Poland), the NN (No Name) theater troupe and museum has taken on the mantle of the guardian of Jewish memory. The organization has created a multi-story exhibition space and online portal (http://tnn.pl/The_Gate_of_Memory_-_English,3362.html) with a neat interactive map (http://teatrnn.pl/makieta/makieta.html). In what is today a homogenous city of Poles, the goal is to raise awareness; to memorialize Lublin's Jewish population, obliterated during the Second World War, as well as its old Jewish quarter, entirely erased from the map by Soviet postwar planners.
As the institute's co-director W. showed us around the exhibit, I was slightly amused by his enthusiasm and optimism: his almost spiritual belief in signs and symbols as a testament to the enduring memory of the Jews who once lived in his city. In the evening, with the same full-bodied energy, W. gave us a private show. Together with an accordionist, he acted out one of the traditional stories of the Jews of Chelm, the town of 'wise men' (ie, fools) neighboring Lublin. In a musical interlude, the two men sang the Yiddish song 'Sapozhkelekh,' a favorite of mine.
I was moved by the performance. I was touched by W.'s energy, sincerity, and love for the material. I was touched to witness a reenactment of the stories I'd loved as a child in the very region in which they originated. As I've spent more and more time in Poland, I've come to sympathize strongly with those Jews (such as Bruno Schulz) who identified primarily as Poles. I'm always touched by memorials that are conducted in Polish: the language that these Jews embraced and spoke and the culture to which they contributed.
My companions, especially those who did not understand Polish, were less impressed by W.'s performance. This is kitsch, they told me. It may have been heart-felt, but the choice to reenact a Chelm story was a mistake. This rendering of the Jewish fool was replete with stereotypical hand gestures, facial expressions, and accent.
On the last day of our trip, we went to Drohobych, once the third largest city in Habsburg Galicia. Today, Drohobych is a middling, typically-looking Ukrainian city, with virtually no traces of either Polishness or Bruno Schulz.
Instead, we met Schulz's last surviving student, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust by the name of Alfred Schreyer. Schreyer speaks Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian; he spoke to us in Polish and made clear he identifies primarily as a Pole. Schreyer is also a performer. He is in his late '80s, yet still sings and performs as part of a trio. When we took him out to dinner and had him sit at the center of the table, he loved the attention.
Upon request, Schreyer entertained us with stories of Bruno Schulz, mainly legends that he had clearly perfected after multiple rounds of retelling. For our part, I had the feeling that our group projected onto Schreyer our own expectations of what we hoped to find in Drohobych; and our reactions to him were therefore characteristically scripted. Some members of our group proposed singing a song together with Schreyer, and since no one knew Stephen Foster, they proposed Afn Pripetchik. Afn Pripetchik is probably the kitchiest Yiddish song that there is. It describes small children learning the Hebrew alphabet by the fire; its last verse instructs the children that even as they suffer from persecution and the burden of the diaspora (goles), they should find strength in the letters themselves. Our group of Americans had arrived in Poland with an almost nostalgic hope of finding traces of Jewish life and culture. We refused to let go of that nostalgia entirely.
Schreyer went on to serenade us with a song he was more familiar with: a Polish-language version of the Yiddish song 'Mayn shtetele Belz.' This seemed far more natural to me than asking him to sing in Yiddish. The reactions around the table were quite varied:
The highlight of our trip to Drohobych was to be a visit to see the remaining Bruno Schulz frescoes. After encountering resistance from the Drohobych art museum, we bribed them by buying 100 tickets (there were 8 of us). The warehouse where the frescoes are housed looks run-down on the outside; the inside is damp and creaky.
The conditions couldn't be worse for the preservation of artwork. We were brought to a room where the remains of the frescoes were literally propped up on chairs for our viewing.
And so we ended our trip in search of Bruno Schulz both disappointed and slightly horrified. Given the challenges in Ukraine, is it even worth attempting to preserve and/or reconstruct remnants of Jewish life and culture? Perhaps we should say, as one of our group members suggested: you can't have it back. And, if this is the case, perhaps Yad Vashem is right: we should be grateful to the museum for rescuing pieces of the Bruno Schulz frescoes before they were vandalized or otherwise destroyed. In other words, should we give up on the goal of memorializing the Jewish experience in Ukraine itself?
I hope that this will not be the case. I hope that Ukraine can gradually learn from Poland's experience; introduce programs of Jewish studies in its major universities; begin to discuss that which it finds so painful. I hope that Lviv's Center for Urban History can continue the work it has begun in researching and publicizing a full picture of the history of Ukrainian cities in the interwar period, one that includes both Poles and Jews.
But most of all, my hope is for American Jews. I hope that we continue to question our own assumptions: the way in which we remember the Holocaust in particular and Jewish history in general; the way in which we view the institutions that present these memories to us. We are still mourning and coming to terms with the violent extermination and white-washing of Jews from the East European landscape. I hope that even as we do so, we begin to form new hopes and expectations regarding Polish-Jewish and Jewish-Ukrainian relations. I hope that we remain open to further discussion. I hope that we remain open to complexity: in the way we view the history of Jews in Poland and Ukraine, in our understanding of the region, and in the way we understand our own identities.
***The trip was organized by the Polish Cultural Institute in New York in collaboration with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the Polish Book Institute.
Whether in Poland or Ukraine, there is a thin line between memory and kitsch, so that outside observers familiar with Polish language and culture differ on what is appropriate or, alternately, offensive.
In the city of Lublin (eastern Poland), the NN (No Name) theater troupe and museum has taken on the mantle of the guardian of Jewish memory. The organization has created a multi-story exhibition space and online portal (http://tnn.pl/The_Gate_of_Memory_-_English,3362.html) with a neat interactive map (http://teatrnn.pl/makieta/makieta.html). In what is today a homogenous city of Poles, the goal is to raise awareness; to memorialize Lublin's Jewish population, obliterated during the Second World War, as well as its old Jewish quarter, entirely erased from the map by Soviet postwar planners.
As the institute's co-director W. showed us around the exhibit, I was slightly amused by his enthusiasm and optimism: his almost spiritual belief in signs and symbols as a testament to the enduring memory of the Jews who once lived in his city. In the evening, with the same full-bodied energy, W. gave us a private show. Together with an accordionist, he acted out one of the traditional stories of the Jews of Chelm, the town of 'wise men' (ie, fools) neighboring Lublin. In a musical interlude, the two men sang the Yiddish song 'Sapozhkelekh,' a favorite of mine.
I was moved by the performance. I was touched by W.'s energy, sincerity, and love for the material. I was touched to witness a reenactment of the stories I'd loved as a child in the very region in which they originated. As I've spent more and more time in Poland, I've come to sympathize strongly with those Jews (such as Bruno Schulz) who identified primarily as Poles. I'm always touched by memorials that are conducted in Polish: the language that these Jews embraced and spoke and the culture to which they contributed.
My companions, especially those who did not understand Polish, were less impressed by W.'s performance. This is kitsch, they told me. It may have been heart-felt, but the choice to reenact a Chelm story was a mistake. This rendering of the Jewish fool was replete with stereotypical hand gestures, facial expressions, and accent.
On the last day of our trip, we went to Drohobych, once the third largest city in Habsburg Galicia. Today, Drohobych is a middling, typically-looking Ukrainian city, with virtually no traces of either Polishness or Bruno Schulz.
Instead, we met Schulz's last surviving student, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust by the name of Alfred Schreyer. Schreyer speaks Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian; he spoke to us in Polish and made clear he identifies primarily as a Pole. Schreyer is also a performer. He is in his late '80s, yet still sings and performs as part of a trio. When we took him out to dinner and had him sit at the center of the table, he loved the attention.
Upon request, Schreyer entertained us with stories of Bruno Schulz, mainly legends that he had clearly perfected after multiple rounds of retelling. For our part, I had the feeling that our group projected onto Schreyer our own expectations of what we hoped to find in Drohobych; and our reactions to him were therefore characteristically scripted. Some members of our group proposed singing a song together with Schreyer, and since no one knew Stephen Foster, they proposed Afn Pripetchik. Afn Pripetchik is probably the kitchiest Yiddish song that there is. It describes small children learning the Hebrew alphabet by the fire; its last verse instructs the children that even as they suffer from persecution and the burden of the diaspora (goles), they should find strength in the letters themselves. Our group of Americans had arrived in Poland with an almost nostalgic hope of finding traces of Jewish life and culture. We refused to let go of that nostalgia entirely.
Schreyer went on to serenade us with a song he was more familiar with: a Polish-language version of the Yiddish song 'Mayn shtetele Belz.' This seemed far more natural to me than asking him to sing in Yiddish. The reactions around the table were quite varied:
The highlight of our trip to Drohobych was to be a visit to see the remaining Bruno Schulz frescoes. After encountering resistance from the Drohobych art museum, we bribed them by buying 100 tickets (there were 8 of us). The warehouse where the frescoes are housed looks run-down on the outside; the inside is damp and creaky.
The conditions couldn't be worse for the preservation of artwork. We were brought to a room where the remains of the frescoes were literally propped up on chairs for our viewing.
And so we ended our trip in search of Bruno Schulz both disappointed and slightly horrified. Given the challenges in Ukraine, is it even worth attempting to preserve and/or reconstruct remnants of Jewish life and culture? Perhaps we should say, as one of our group members suggested: you can't have it back. And, if this is the case, perhaps Yad Vashem is right: we should be grateful to the museum for rescuing pieces of the Bruno Schulz frescoes before they were vandalized or otherwise destroyed. In other words, should we give up on the goal of memorializing the Jewish experience in Ukraine itself?
I hope that this will not be the case. I hope that Ukraine can gradually learn from Poland's experience; introduce programs of Jewish studies in its major universities; begin to discuss that which it finds so painful. I hope that Lviv's Center for Urban History can continue the work it has begun in researching and publicizing a full picture of the history of Ukrainian cities in the interwar period, one that includes both Poles and Jews.
But most of all, my hope is for American Jews. I hope that we continue to question our own assumptions: the way in which we remember the Holocaust in particular and Jewish history in general; the way in which we view the institutions that present these memories to us. We are still mourning and coming to terms with the violent extermination and white-washing of Jews from the East European landscape. I hope that even as we do so, we begin to form new hopes and expectations regarding Polish-Jewish and Jewish-Ukrainian relations. I hope that we remain open to further discussion. I hope that we remain open to complexity: in the way we view the history of Jews in Poland and Ukraine, in our understanding of the region, and in the way we understand our own identities.
***The trip was organized by the Polish Cultural Institute in New York in collaboration with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the Polish Book Institute.
