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rfmcdonaldThe situation described in the most recent issue of NOW Toronto in Ethan Eisenberg's "Dances with Jews", an exploration of how some Poles are excitedly embracing Jewish traditions and Jewish culture even without very many Jews around, caught my eye.
This and other similar attempts come more than sixty years after the Holocaust's end to recover from the loss comes two or three generations after the initial shock, after nearly a half-century of repression. It might Curiously enough, that figures aligns roughly with that provided by Simon J. Rabinovitch in his review of Omer Bartov recent Erased, an exploration of how massive post-1945 population movements, a Soviet ideology that assimilated victims regardless of nationality to a single cause, then post-1991 nationalism in Ukraine helped effaces centuries of Jewish life and places of Jewish genocide in Galicia.
Rabinovitch suggests in his review that much of this willed repression can likely be traced to the fragility of the Ukrainian national project, and suggests that the gelling of the Ukranian nation-state is allowing many Ukrainian to relax, as it were, and tackle this trauma. Not, it should be noted, that either Rabinovitch or Rabinovitch and Bartov himself seems willing to tackle the possibility that Ukrainians might be in the process of trying to recuperate their own old memories, explicitly denying that the suffering endured by Ukrainians under Stalin could bear any comparison to that endured by Jews.
Jennifer Steinhauer posed the question back in 2001 on the pages of The New York Times: What would New York City, and to some extent America, look like if AIDS hadn't come and killed tens of thousands of people? There were some interesting speculations--disease sufferers would become organized political groups, disco wouldn't have given ground so easily to hip-hop--but it ended with a qutoe from Simon Doonan to the effect that the whole episode had been decided nightmare, destroying social networks and being nothing more than a long sustained nightmare.
There's a thread uniting these threads, I know, but I can't find it. Here it is regardless. Your help would, of course, be appreciated.
First-time visitors to the Krakow Jewish Cultural Festival might have a hard time imagining that almost two decades ago at the same event, lines of riot police with water cannons faced off against angry skinheads.
Such a raw-edged scene today would be unthinkable given the redevelopment of Kazimierz, Krakow’s former Jewish quarter founded by King Casimir the Great in the 14th century. Despite the centuries-old buildings, the feeling of a stage set still pervades the area, which Steven Spielberg used as a location for Schindler’s List.
Facing the main square, Jewish-themed restaurants offer traditional Yiddish food, caricatures of Hasidic Jews decorate the walls, and klezmer bands play for the guests. Along one small street, imitation 1930s merchant signs hang above souvenir shops selling wooden figurines depicting elderly Orthodox Jews.
From its beginning in an old repertory theatre in 1988 as a conference on Polish-Jewish relations, the Jewish Cultural Festival has grown into one of the largest events of its kind in the world, with more than 200 concerts, lectures and exhibitions on Jewish music, dance, literature and architecture over 10 days.
It’s organized by local Poles and its success reflects their growing interest in the legacy of the 3.5 millions Jews who lived in Poland before the war.
According to Michael Alpert, a key figure in the contemporary klezmer and Yiddish folk music revival, founder Janusz Makuch had fundamental doubts about his project from the start. "He was unsure if he had the right to hold such a festival on the largest Jewish graveyard in the world, to be seen to be dancing on the bones of the dead."
But Makuch persevered, using the festival as a challenge to the era’s officially imposed silence on the place and fate of the Jews in Polish history. His goal, he has said, was to educate Poles about the forgotten culture that existed in their country for hundreds of years.
This and other similar attempts come more than sixty years after the Holocaust's end to recover from the loss comes two or three generations after the initial shock, after nearly a half-century of repression. It might Curiously enough, that figures aligns roughly with that provided by Simon J. Rabinovitch in his review of Omer Bartov recent Erased, an exploration of how massive post-1945 population movements, a Soviet ideology that assimilated victims regardless of nationality to a single cause, then post-1991 nationalism in Ukraine helped effaces centuries of Jewish life and places of Jewish genocide in Galicia.
As Bartov recounts, it is not that the residents do not possess a culture of memory and memorialization. On the contrary, memorials to Ukrainian national heroes and victims of the NKVD (the Soviet secret police) have been prominently erected in all of these post-Soviet towns. (As the Germans moved east in 1941, they used the execution of thousands of Ukrainian political prisoners by the NKVD-equated by the Germans with Jews-as a pretext for inciting Ukrainian and Polish revenge against the Jews.)
As Bartov argues, these monuments celebrating Ukrainian national heroism, often erected at or nearby sites relevant to Jewish life and death, seem to actively deny the historical significance (or reality) of Jewish victimhood. Oftentimes, Ukrainian memorials seek to demonstrate equivalence between Nazi and Soviet crimes, especially at sites where the Soviets made some effort to acknowledge the mass murder of civilians (but never Jews as Jews) during the German occupation. More frequently, post-independence memorials to Ukrainian national heroes have been erected in the centers of towns while the mass murder of the war years is simply left unacknowledged and the remnants of Jewish life-synagogues, cemeteries, Jewish hospitals-are paved over, converted to other use, or left to crumble.
Rabinovitch suggests in his review that much of this willed repression can likely be traced to the fragility of the Ukrainian national project, and suggests that the gelling of the Ukranian nation-state is allowing many Ukrainian to relax, as it were, and tackle this trauma. Not, it should be noted, that either Rabinovitch or Rabinovitch and Bartov himself seems willing to tackle the possibility that Ukrainians might be in the process of trying to recuperate their own old memories, explicitly denying that the suffering endured by Ukrainians under Stalin could bear any comparison to that endured by Jews.
Jennifer Steinhauer posed the question back in 2001 on the pages of The New York Times: What would New York City, and to some extent America, look like if AIDS hadn't come and killed tens of thousands of people? There were some interesting speculations--disease sufferers would become organized political groups, disco wouldn't have given ground so easily to hip-hop--but it ended with a qutoe from Simon Doonan to the effect that the whole episode had been decided nightmare, destroying social networks and being nothing more than a long sustained nightmare.
There's a thread uniting these threads, I know, but I can't find it. Here it is regardless. Your help would, of course, be appreciated.
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