You can’t go home anymore. That’s what Thomas Wolfe famously said. But what if you could? What if you could travel back in time, watch your grandparents playing as children, see them meet and court and fall in love? What if you could stand unseen and observe the unfolding of the primary, mythical conflict that marked the family forever with indelible dysfunction, or witness the family’s courage and commitment that continues to nourish your family with vision, goodness and hope? Would you? Would you be willing to go home to meet the past face to face? Or do you believe that it is necessary to break free of the past in order for a person to be truly free?
In an intensely personal and wrenching memoir entitled A Tale of Love and Darkness, the acclaimed Israeli author Amos Oz weaves imagination, memory and the stories of his family into a saga of his childhood in Jerusalem of the 1940’s and 50’s. It is a narrative of a Jewish love-hate affair with Eastern Europe that travels from Poland and the Ukraine to pre-state Israel, with major stops in Rovno, Vilna, Odessa and Prague. Ultimately it is Amos Oz’s own story, the story of a little boy who bears the weight of generations on his shoulders and who grows up to bear witness to the travails and hopes of the Jewish people.
This past summer, eighteen of us from Kol Shofar traveled to Poland and the Ukraine with the same audacious goal in mind. We went to discover our grandparents, to see where and how they lived. We went to touch and caress the roots from which our tree of Jewish life sprang in the hope that we might understand ourselves better. We went to hear silence and to know death. We went to uncover the flower of a newly budding Jewish life, to find comfort and maybe, hope.
The first thing my daughter Arielle said to me in Poland was “I feel as if it should be in black and white.” For those of us of a certain age, born here, our first images of Poland come from grainy news reels and old Holocaust movies. A place of blood and ash, it can only be captured in grey. Yet Poland in the late spring is verdant, lush, with thick forests and lovely streams. One can imagine, before the blood, before the ash, Yiddish poets and mystics alike roaming the woods, falling in love with Creation. All the green is disconcerting. A place of such death, yet it has such beauty.
Exploring Poland and the Ukraine is like playing hide and seek in a cemetery: there are ghosts everywhere and if you know where to look you might get to talk with them. The whole country feels like a cemetery. There are cemeteries with huge old tombstones, carved with flowery, pious inscriptions, and there are cemeteries that used to have tombstones but which are now empty, open fields. They were destroyed by the Nazis or, equally often, plowed under by the Soviets. In Krakow there is a cemetery which had been in use for 300 years and which holds the holy remains of the greatest rabbinic scholars of the 17th century. Arielle liked this cemetery. “At least these people,” she observed, “died of natural causes.” Of course Auschwitz/Birkenau is the biggest cemetery of them all, but it feels as if every knoll in the country, every forest clearing, is a place of death. In some open fields you can stick your hand into the ground and pull up remnants of human bone.
It wasn’t always this way. The towns and cities of Poland and the Ukraine were once filled with religious and secular living side by side; with hasidim and misnagdim, communists and socialists, bundists and yiddishists, Jews of every political persuasion, each with their own ideologically oriented nursery schools, social clubs and their own party-line newspaper. The great Yiddish writers serialized their first novels in the papers. The Yiddish playwrights and musicians saw their names in lights. Hasidim experienced ecstasy in the teaching of their rebbes and the synagogues were filled. The streets overflowed too with the sound of argument and debate about Jewish survival, the backdrop to our own cantankerous divisiveness.
Strangely, Eastern Europe is still a place alive with Jewish culture; it’s just empty of Jews. In the squares of Warsaw and Krakow upscale restaurants serve kosher-style meals to yuppies. The Yiddish Theatre in Warsaw is alive and well, with Polish actors learning the repertoire with perfect Yiddish accents and playing regularly to full houses. If you listen carefully you can hear klezmer music wafting on the wind. After spending a full day in the death camps of Auschwitz/Birkenau, we drove east towards the Ukrainian border and stopped in the charming and picturesque town of Tarnow for dinner. As we left the restaurant at about 9:30 p.m. we heard klezmer music coming from the town square. Following the sounds we made our way to an empty field just off the square. It once had been the synagogue, but it had been bombed out by the Nazis. Miraculously the old stone bimah, built with four pillars and a canopy on top, survived intact. A Klezmer band was playing on the bimah and the audience, filled with young people, was rocking out. At the end of the concert, the town impresario thanked the crowd for coming to the concert “in our synagogue.” Except, of course, that he was not a Jew; the band members were not Jews; and no one in the audience, except us, was a Jew, because all the Jews had been murdered some 63 years before.
The Polish and Ukrainian countryside is, for the most part, a land without Jews, yet there are places where Jews can still be found. In Radzivillov, there remains one Jewish man. He owns a local tavern, and knows that the movie theatre was once the town synagogue and that the barren field nearby used to be filled with tombstones marking Jewish graves. He also knows the trail into the forest that the Jews of Radzivillov walked when they were taken to dig pits in a clearing and to be shot. The pits, of course, are still there.
In the bigger towns and cities Jewish life is being resuscitated. In Lvov, once known as Lemberg, we spent Erev Shabbat at the Turei Zahav Synagogue, which in the 1650’s was the seat of Lemberg’s chief rabbi, David Halevi Segal, the most important Jewish scholar of his era. Like most synagogues, this one is also missing a roof and walls. It is just an empty field where the sanctuary stood. The vestibule leading from the street to the sanctuary still stands, though, and it is in this vestibule that a group of about 14 elderly men and 20 elderly women gather to pray each Shabbat and to eat together. The evening service is led by a one of the younger men who read every word out loud and stumbled over many of them. Most of the people could not read the Hebrew at all, but they sang what they knew with devotion and feeling. After davenning, the vestibule became the dining room and we all sat down to a scrumptious kosher dinner of soup and gefilte fish and chopped liver and chicken and stuffed derma (khishke) and kugel and a few vegetables and cake and tea. The menu seemed pretty familiar—it’s what was served at my house every Friday evening of my childhood. But more remarkable, the faces were familiar! Most of the group spoke no English or Hebrew, so we communicated by gazing at each other with eyes brimming over with tears. In his book, Lost, Daniel Mendelsohn begins by telling us that, as a little boy, just by walking in the room he would cause his relatives to cry because he looked so much like Cousin Shmiel, who didn’t survive. So we cried too, for the faces of our hosts were the faces of our grandparents, and of those whose lives were extinguished. And they cried, as well, because we reminded them of… hope.
At the end of the meal, the man who led the prayers began raising his voice and speaking very quickly in Yiddish to some members of our group. Elimeylech, our host, explained: “He can’t believe Jews in America don’t read Hebrew. He can’t understand it. How can you live in America, free, and not know how to pray?”
I thought of this conversation again while we were in Kiev. There, in one of the city’s beautiful, green parks, is the death pit called Babi Yar. Unlike the pits that Jews had to dig before they were shot, Babi Yar is actually a large, natural ravine. It was here, on September 29 and 30, 1941, that 33,771 Jews from Kiev were lined up and shot. At the site of the ravine there is a massive, Soviet-style monument with a dedication, in Ukrainian and Yiddish, to “the heroic victims of fascism.” It was not enough for the Soviets to have a country without Jews; they wanted a country without memory of Jews. We sat there a long time, saddened and angry that Jewish identity had been so blithely erased from this place. And it was here that the question arose again: How is it possible that so many Jews are willing to give away their Jewish identity so freely? How is it possible that we have every possible freedom, every possible opportunity, and yet we easily disown ourselves from Yiddishkeit? How is it possible, and what are we going to do about it?
There is a story about a Dutch Jew who survived the Nazis by hiding in attics and cellars in Holland. After the war, he came to America where he studied philosophy, received his Ph.D. and began his teaching career. He was a totally assimilated Jew and had lost all connection to Judaism, the Jewish community and Israel. He was an expert in Spinoza and decided that just as the Jewish community had ex-communicated Spinoza he would excommunicate the Jewish community from his own life. In the late 1960s his marriage had deteriorated and he was on the verge of divorce. His career was going very well but he felt that something essential was missing from his life. Then one day, the president of the college asked him to go to the airport to pick up a guest speaker from New York who was to deliver a lecture on campus that evening. “Who’s the speaker?” he asked. “His name is Abraham Joshua Heschel and he is the most prominent Jewish theologian and philosopher alive today.” The professor was annoyed but reluctantly took the hour long drive out to the airport. He met Heschel at the gate, picked up the luggage, and began driving back to the college without saying a word, but when Heschel began to discuss philosophy with him, the professor became delighted and amazed at Heschel’s vast knowledge and engaged manner. As they approached the president’s residence, Heschel turned to the professor and said, -- “Tell me, professor, are you Jewish?” The professor nodded curtly. Heschel looked and him and calmly said “And, what are you doing about it?” “And what am I doing about it? I never thought about it,” the professor responded. “If you don’t mind,” Heschel said, “May I suggest that you do?” A few hours later the professor arrived in the lecture hall for Heschel’s address. The hall was crowded and with some difficulty, he found a seat. He listened to the lecture and was absolutely spellbound. So was the woman who sat beside him. He introduced himself to the woman, invited her for coffee to discuss the lecture. The woman was a Jewish widow whom he later married. For weeks, all he could think about was Heschel’s question: “what are you doing about it?” Overcome, he made the decision to learn more about Jewish life. As he sat at his desk writing to Heschel to explain that their encounter had changed his life, there was a knock on the door. It was the mailman delivering a large brown envelope. In the envelope there was a pair of tefillin and a siddur, gifts from Abraham Joshua Heschel.
Our pilgrimage to Poland and the Ukraine was never meant as a tour of cemeteries. It was meant as an encounter with our communal and family history that would change our lives. Like Amos Oz, we went seeking the past so that we could understand who we had become. We came home knowing that we who sit here today bear the weight of the past on our shoulders, and knowing that the past can only be served by building a vibrant and meaningful future.
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