What’s left of Polish Jewry? Around 10,000 people, and a few well-kept cemeteries. This week, we are publishing the first part of a report by American journalist Gabriel Rom, devoted to the preservation of the burial heritage of Poland’s Jews, and the strange ambivalence of memory that this reflects. The conservative Polish government had devoted substantial sums of money to the restoration of Jewish cemeteries, while at the same time spending years constructing a national narrative that was intended to be free of grey areas. Even going so far as to criminalize the idea that Poland was responsible for the Holocaust. The burden of memory – a memory laden with guilt – is met with silence and denial, with the result that Poland struggles to fully honor its participation in a European Union that has made lucidity about its past a cornerstone of its political identity. But Gabriel Rom’s journey among the tombstones is not limited to well-ordered alleys and heritage-laden names: behind the desire to whitewash history and pretend that Jewishness and Polishness are seamlessly linked, we find moss-covered monuments to the victims of the Holocaust, and plaques whose names have already been almost erased. It is these fragments of a disappearing memory that his report echoes.
The second text we’re publishing this week also deals with the memory of a vanished Eastern Judaism, and how its glorified summoning up in the present can serve as a smokescreen. We asked Boris Czerny to write a review of Tales from the Borders, the latest book by Israeli-American historian Omer Bartov, a specialist in the role of the Wehrmacht in the Holocaust and inter-ethnic relations in Ukrainian Galicia. Bartov sets out to restore the intimate memory of a Judaism at the European “end of the world”, through the tales that circulated among the inhabitants of Buczacz, the Galician town from which his mother came. But, as Czerny points out, while Bartov’s historical reconstruction is rich and evocative, if not rigorous, it serves above all to condemn the way in which Jews have entered another “end of the world”: Israel. Indeed, why does Bartov use his description of the cultural richness of a Jewish nation integrated into a multi-ethnic Galician society as the basis for an anti-Zionist argument? This never ceases to amaze. Bartov, Cerny tells us, sees Zionism as a brutal and proud nationalism, quick to assert itself through violence at the expense of its neighbors. Yet the Jewish society of Galicia, almost all of which was exterminated, was one of the most fertile breeding grounds for socialist Zionism, and for the budding field of international law. Playing with the idea that the victim ultimately resembles his executioner, and not merely criticizing Israeli policy, objectively makes Bartov a prime source for the antisemitic positions that are advancing under the guise of contemporary anti-Zionism.
Finally, since the idea that the realization of a state for Jews is intrinsically suspect is clearly still alive and well, and for those who haven’t yet read it and sent it to all their acquaintances who confuse criticism of Israel in the name of international law with anti-Zionist criticism, we’re leaving one more week to Julia Christ’s article “Anti-Zionism: a realistic option?”.
Happy reading!
