Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland depicts an academic but also a personal and political recovery of Jewish space in Poland. Though “space” can operate as a vague theoretical term in scholarly discourse, editors Erica Lehrer and Michael Meng have collected essays that inspect, in impressive and immediate detail, a wide array of revealing sites: the often contested Polish State Museum at Auschwitz; the historically transformed neighbourhoods of Muranow, in Warsaw, and Kazimierz, in Krakow; rural cemeteries, market squares and synagogues; and the newly opened Museum of History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.
The dedicated reader travels contemporary Poland, encountering small-town developments in Chmielnik and Brzostek and big city itineraries in Warsaw, Lodz and Krakow. In all of these, one is challenged by contrasting Polish and Jewish views of how the past should inform the present.
Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland evokes a revolution – the word is not too strong – in the possibilities, new goals, and shifting facts on the ground associated with Jewish history and lives in Poland today.
The beginning of this revolution can be marked at various points in time, but certainly the collapse of the Soviet system in Eastern Europe ensured that the false ideology served up at sites like the State Museum at Auschwitz would be jettisoned in favour of a more honest historical account. The remnants of the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps in southern Poland remain a key access point for Poles to the history of Jews in their country. Since the 1960s, one of the volume’s writers tells us, over six million Polish youths have visited as part of their history studies.
Among the most impressive essays is Konstanty Gebert’s Reading the Palimpsest. It offers a detailed tour of central Warsaw where the Ghetto stood, in an effort to convey how a new city stands on the ruins of prewar Jewish neighbourhoods. Gebert, a Polish journalist and advocate for the country’s Jewish community, positions himself at the present-day intersection of John Paul II Avenue and Solidarity Avenue, in order to point to the bits of prewar and wartime street grid that can still be seen amidst the Soviet-inspired and post-1989 architecture and urban plan.
A visitor would be wise to use Gebert’s essay as a guidebook to undertake a thorough exploration of how “Jewish memory is present – or absent – in contemporary Polish spaces.”
More far-flung sites come in for similarly careful examination. Two substantial essays present travelogues that describe the remaking of Jewish space in the Polish countryside. Robert Cohn’s Stony Survivors: Images of Jewish Space on the Polish Landscape, provides an overview of the condition of synagogues, ruined and renovated; the impact of a tradition of photography by Poles aimed at depicting Jewish cemetery grounds; alongside a consideration of the recent “proliferation of images of and perspectives on Jewish spaces on the Internet.”
The latter is a notable phenomenon. Access to ancestral towns, which was difficult under Communism, and required attentive well-guided travel prior to the Internet age, is now offered by private postings, through web sites run by organizations devoted to Polish Jewish heritage, and, more serendipitously, by way of sites mounted independently by towns and tourist agencies.
A related essay is anthropologist Jonathan Webber’s A Jew, a Cemetery, and a Polish Village: A Tale of the Restoration of Memory. Like Gebert’s piece, Webber’s essay immerses the reader in the life of a Polish landscape – alive, as it is, with Jewish memory.
Webber’s research includes interviews with rural Poles regarding their memories of Jews and the built environment that vanished with them after the end of the German occupation. He recounts a repeated experience – familiar to anyone with their own Polish travel stories – of standing in a small-town market square and asking a passerby about the Jewish past .“‘You see that house?’ a local responds. ‘That’s where the rabbi – his name was Steiner – used to live. It was a wooden house, but it’s not there anymore.’ I could, of course, see no wooden house,” Webber explains, “but it was clearly present in the mind’s eye of the villager showing it to me. I would be told that in fact all the houses in the market square used to be inhabited by Jews. There were rich Jews here, there were poor Jews there, a distillery here, a leather shop there. Fifty years after the beginning of the German occupation, elderly informants could still rattle off the names of those Jews: they had been to school with them and could remember their names as if it was yesterday.”
The story Webber has to tell is that of the southern village of Brzostek, from which his own ancestors emigrated in the late 19th century. Though the place retains a synagogue, repurposed as a hostel, and a road sign by the market that reads “ul. Zydowska” (Jewish Street), its Jewish past, at first glance, seems forgotten. Most notably, the cemetery, destroyed by the Germans, though recognized as a cemetery by locals, lay empty of headstones and unfenced.
Webber embarks on an effort to have the cemetery fenced and marked, with the encouragement and interest of local players as varied as the priest and mayor, schoolchildren who dedicate themselves to a study of the town’s Jewish past, their teachers, who help prepare the re-dedication ceremony at the cemetery, in which as many as 600 people take part including the head rabbi of the Warsaw Jewish community.
Webber tells his story with great personal sentiment, as well as savvy anthropological self-reflexiveness. One feels that this sort of thing should be done wherever possible on the Polish landscape.
Early in his essay Webber muses about the future of Jewish memory among an aging Polish population and their youthful inheritors. In places like Brzostek, he wonders, would “future generations of farmers and neighbours preserve it? Or would it slowly die out? Could this memory ever be re-mobilized in quite new ways?”
These are the questions asked throughout Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland. The feeling one gets upon completing the collection is that they are questions that demand our attention. Webber’s invocation of them is heartfelt. Other writers raise less touching motives – nostalgia, or, worse, the prospect of Jewish cultural festivals as sources of tourism and economic development. These less attractive motives will, of necessity, play an important role in the reassertion of Jewish life and memory in Polish space.