A tough trip east

The Train to Warsaw by Gwen Edelman published by Grove Press

Today the train ride into Warsaw offers equal portions of wonder and the mundane. Pre-World War II red brick rail buildings mix with sparkling new office and residential developments.

Josef Stalin’s “gift from the Soviet people to the Polish nation,” the rococo Palace of Culture and Science, is overshadowed by a skyline of postmodern glass and steel bank buildings. The graffiti on concrete underpasses is generic, at once colourful and hideous, like graffiti in any other large city with its own complement of disaffected youth searching for underground forms of expression. 

The train that approaches Warsaw in Gwen Edelman’s second novel, The Train to Warsaw, arrives amidst the snowy anomie of a deep Polish winter: “The sky hung white and motionless above the earth and a pale thin light shone on the snow. Once in a while the bare branches of a tree became visible beneath the snow. And once they saw a bird with black wings as he perched on a snowy limb.”

On board are the longtime lovers, Jascha and Lilka, both of whom escaped the Warsaw Ghetto and who have not been back to their birthplace since the war. Jascha is a successful writer based in London, whose first book described the deprivations of the ghetto. His partner, who is more willing and upbeat than he is about their return, tries to counter Jascha’s cynicism about Poles and the idea of a homecoming. 

It is 1985, in the late years of the fading Soviet empire. Jascha has been invited to give a reading at the Warsaw Writers’ House. Lilka would like to revisit places she and her parents loved before the war, like the Saxon Gardens in the centre of the city. They are an odd couple on the road, and much of what happens to them in the Soviet-era Polish capital takes place in a less than impressive room in the once luxurious Hotel Bristol.  There, they weather a snowy night, recounting, in Edelman’s spare and evocative prose, wartime experiences that each has resisted telling the other over the course of their years together. From this tête-à-tête comes the novel’s strongest section, an extended, detailed, but also dreamlike portrait of the ghetto into which the Germans pushed Warsaw’s Jews in November, 1940.

Edelman has much to tell us about this subject. She is adept at conveying the increasing desolation of the ghetto community; its contraction as the population was thinned by hunger, illness and deportation; its underground culture, including cafés for those who could afford a wartime night-life; the tunnels through which goods and people were smuggled to the “Aryan” side, and the smuggling economy writ large – its leaders, its methods, its meaning as a lifeline to those incarcerated within the ghetto’s walls. 

The most unusual scene associated with smuggling involves the movement of 26 milk cows over the shared wall that separates the Catholic Powazki cemetery from the Jewish burial grounds. One animal resists, as if it can conceive of what is happening on the Jewish side of the cemetery wall.

Though Edelman succeeds admirably at breathing life into her portrait of wartime events, she fails in her efforts to convey the character of Polish-Jewish entanglements in postwar Warsaw. Jascha and Lilka make halting forays into the snow-covered city, following Lilka’s nostalgic yearnings. But little comes of these walks. The snow and cold are ever present. Polish passersby remain inscrutable in their dark overcoats and fur hats. The city itself, beneath the blanketing pressures of late communism, and at a time of momentous political upheaval, does not come into focus. 

The novel’s greatest failure is a series of climactic scenes, including Jascha’s public reading of his wartime book, that are cliché-ridden and say little revealing about the relationship between Poles and Jews after the Holocaust. Jascha’s first instinct, to dismiss Poland as a graveyard and Poles as the Germans’ assistants in mass murder, leads to a predictable fiasco. His host is obsequious and has not, after all, read Jascha’s work. Jascha’s urge to lecture his audience destroys the event in a way that Edelman presents as inevitable.

“‘I am back in Poland,’ he began, ‘after 40 years.’ The audience began to clap. ‘Why are you clapping?’ he asked coldly, and they stopped abruptly. ‘The last time I was here,’ he said, ‘I had some difficulties.’ They were silent. ‘But,’ he went on, ‘all this is over. Is it not?’ There was no response. ‘As you know, a part of the population was shut behind walls.’ They were growing increasingly uncomfortable. Several people coughed. And when the walls came down, almost no one was left. A man got up noisily. ‘I won’t listen to this,’ he said. ‘You can leave,’ said Jascha, ‘but that doesn’t change what happened here.’”

With this lecture and his reading, Jascha clears the room of all but a few willing listeners. It’s worth noting that the period Edelman means to depict included important shifts in Polish life, in particular the increasing interest among Polish labour and democratic leaders in Jewish culture, in part, because of the communist authorities’ efforts to silence it.

It was complicated and challenging to be a Jew in Poland in the 1980s, but it is misleading, as Edelman suggests in her Writers’ House scene, to suggest that those in the audience had not “seen” a Jew “in so many years.” In the early 1980s, Polish Jews, including newspaper editor and activist Adam Michnik, played key roles in anti-government organizations. This sort of melancholy rendering of the time and place cheats the novel’s readers of a deeper and more interesting depiction of the period and its possibilities.

Lilka signals her own ambiguous feelings in a soliloquy near the novel’s end. “Warsaw was the most beautiful city,” she says. “Our beloved Warsaw… Warsaw, she said, her cheeks flushed, were we not loyal to you?… Warsaw, answer me.” There is more to these pleas than mere nostalgia and romantic yearning. But The Train to Warsaw cannot entirely come to terms with what Lilka’s cry, upon her return, might mean.